AppFlow

Disk Bjango is well known for their Mac application, iStat Menu’s.  Although iStat was previously free, Bjango have super-charged the application and re-released it, now as a premium App.  And that means money.  To backup this you can also get iStat menu’s for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

iStat for Mac will offer you just about everything you could possible want in a monitoring package.  Whether it is temperatures you want to monitor, the CPU usage or how hard you are hammering your network iStat is the package for you.  In full iStat allows you to monitor:

• CPU
• Memory
• Disk Usage
• Disk Activity
• Network
• Sensors
• Date & Time
• Battery

So, with this level of support it does not matter whether you are running servers or your average desktop computer, it will still provide with useful additional statistics that you mac does not otherwise offer.

CPU Tools

The first widget offered is the CPU widget.  This can be useful in order to monitor how active your CPU is.  iStat menus will allow you to configure all widgets as you like for example you could change the area graph in the menu bar for a bar graph, pie chart of a simple percentage.  On top of this you can configure how often it updates, whether to show multiple CPUs on one graph of separately, or many other options.

The widget (once clicked) will display a drop-down with even more information.  It will break down the CPU usage into User, System, Nice and Idle, as well as presenting you with a more detailed graph for each CPU.

Further down the widget will show you the five processes that are eating the most CPU power.  This can be very useful if you want up the performance of your computer as it quickly allows you to see what is bogging it down the most.

On top of all of this their are more tools for those of you who are more geeky.  You can get your system’s load averages, process information (number of tasks and number of threads) the system uptime, and the actual running time.

Their are also menu’s option that allow fast access to other useful system tools.

Memory Tools

The memory tools configuration options are identical to those to the CPU widget.  You, like with the CPU widget, get to choose between a bar graph, area graph, pie chart and straight percentage.  In addition to these option the memory widget also has an option to show you have many GB’s of free memory you have and how GB’s of memory is in use.

This widget is ideal for trying to work out what is bogging down your Mac.  It will show you, if you know what any of it means, how much memory is wired, active, inactive and free.  I will also follow this up with a graph that show’s all of this information in a more visual form.

Below this it, like the CPU widget, shows the top 5 most memory intensive applications and how much memory they are using.

On top of all this it will also show you how many Page Ins have taken place, Page Outs and how much swap space is in use.

All of this would be extremely useful information for those who want to push their Mac that little further and optimise it for maximum speed.

Disk Usage

Disk usage is something we all need to monitor.  It is vital to know when your Mac is running out of space so that you can upgrade the hard drive.  Whether you have the latest Mac Pro, loaded with storage, or the oldest of iBooks you will eventually run out of space as you add more programs to your arsenal and load of more and more data from music to photo’s to documents.

This widget is a pretty simple one.  As normal you can have either Used/Free space, a bar graph, a pie chart, or a percentage.  You can also choose which Hard Drive appear in the menu bar.

Then, on the drop-down you can view how much free space you have, used space an a little percentage bar for each hard drive.  And thats it, pretty simple all in all.

Disk Activity

Although this would not be much useful for most people, and I really am not too sure why you would want it, some of the ore nerdy types may like the Disk Activity widget.  Now, if anyone can think of any reason what-so-ever as to why you want it please do comment below.

Unlike the other, this widget does not include the normal configuration options.  On this one you will instead get two flashing lights, red and green, to signify read and write activity.  Instead, or on top os, this you can have a little line graph, or read and write arrows.

On the drop-down this widget will show each hard drive, simply presenting the read and write information for each hard drive.

Networking

For those who are constantly transferring large amounts of data over a network, this tool is vital.  It allows you to monitor how much bandwidth your are using, how fast data is transferring and what devices are online as well as what the IP address is for each one.

The task bar widget will allow you to quickly view a small graph of you data transfer, or it can be swapped for written statistics or in/out lights.

The widget will tell you what location you have active, allowing you to change your location, your IP on active networking devices, your bandwidth usages and your peak bandwidth.

It will also support statistics for devices such as your mobile broadband devices.

Sensors

The sensors widget is one that holds that most information.  If your piece of hardware has a thermostat in it, sensors is on the case.

The widget will show the temperature for any piece of supported hardware.  For example mine holds the CPU temperature, but I could have it hold the temperature for the battery or the hard drive.

Once you open the drop-down menu you get presented with as much data as you could ever want.  Whether you want to change your fan speeds profile or check to see hot your hard drive is this widget will let you do it in seconds.

On top of all of this it will also tell you what voltage is flowing where, what the amperage for the component is and how many watts of energy it is using.  If you do extreme computing then this is the widget for you.  It will easily allow you to bring your high CPU  temperatures down when you are rendering videos or doing high-end graphic work.

Date & Time

OK, so now your thinking “What? But my Mac already has the date…. and the time!”.  But not like this is doesn’t. On my Mac this is now replacing the standard time widget.

So, if I remember write, the default one will do what… tell you the time?  This one has so much more than that.  This one will tell you the date, the time, the moon phases, And allows you add as many extra time zones to it as will fit on your screen.

This widget in itself as also been designed very well, so well that you can slide in the place of the default widget and nobody will ever know that it is not the default one.  It is near-on identical to the original widget.

So, if you want that little extra from your time information then this widget will do the trick, but for your average suer it’s not worth buying iStat just for this.  Save your money, and spend it on something else.

Battery

Again, this adds that little extra over the system defaults.  This widget will help maintain your battery. Like the old one, it will tell you how much battery you have remaining and how long that will last but it will also tell you how many cycles you have done on your MacBook, remembering that your modern MacBook battery is good for 1000 cycles, this will help you judge when best to replace your battery.

This widget will also calculate how healthy your battery is meaning that you have yet another way to see if your battery needs replacing.  This will also help you to judge if you are not treating your battery properly.

This widget will then go into even more detail.  It will tell you what capacity your battery held when new and what it now holds along with how many amps your are drawing from your power sources and how many volts.