Mac OS X Hacks

Checking Your Mac’s Pulse

iPulse provides a quick, colorful overview of what’s going on with your Mac’s CPU, memory, drives, and network activity under the hood.

The Iconfactory’s (http://www.iconfactory.com/) iPulse (http://www.iconfactory.com/ip_home.asp) ($9 shareware) provides a visually appealing view of your Mac’s vitals as your drives hum, memory churns, and network flows away under your fingertips (see Figure 4-32).

Figure 4-32. System monitoring with iPulse

Yes, it does strike us as a little esoteric and more than a little unnecessary at first blush. However, it’s well worth the few minutes it takes to decipher its interface and the few cycles it takes to leave it running in an unused corner of your desktop.

iPulse’s gauges (refer to Figure 4-32) monitor:

• CPU utilization (inner blue circle), both user and system space

• Memory usage (middle ring between nine and three o’clock) in percentage used/unused and page swapping in/out (outermost ring between nine and three o’clock)

• Disk-space usage (middle ring between three and nine o’clock) with disk-full warning

• Network traffic (outermost ring between three and nine o’clock), both in (red) and out (green)

Each gauge, along with its graphical representation, displays an absolute value numerically for quick perusal.

iPulse even sports a nifty analog clock with second hand (that black dot in Figure 4-32) and day of month (that ...