14 DAY TRIAL // Developed by Raging Menace, MenuMeters is a general-purpose, monitoring utility that allows users to see usually hidden details about the activity of their system's CPU, disk drives, network and memory.
The MenuMeters monitors are SystemUIServer plug-ins (also known as Menu Extras), therefore can be reordered using command-drag and the program will remember their positions in the menubar when you login or restart. The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage or broken out as user and system time. The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system (anything that is an IOKit BlockStorage driver).
And, while the Net Meter displays network throughput as arrows, bytes per second and/or as a graph, both the arrows and the graph are scaled using a user-selected scaling factor and calculation.
The Memory Meter (probably the most popular feature with this app) can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph or as used/free totals. For each indicator, users get to specify how often they want it updated, the colors employed for the graph, the icons and other settings.
As many as five new features have made their way into this MenuMeters release, and just as many core changes. Several bug fixes are also incorporated in MenuMeters 1.4 Beta 1.
For starters, the piece of software is now Snow Leopard-compatible (Universal Binary); it now includes MenuCracker 2.x for Snow Leopard and for a better, long-term compatibility with other menubar add-ons; it hides more inactive statistics on inactive network interfaces; it boasts a simplified Intel CPU naming (“Intel” not 80486); and it enables support for IPv6 addresses in the network menu, based on patches from Smith Kennedy, according to the developer.
Major changes include major code cleanup, “fixing a number of obscure bugs and probably introducing some more,” according to the folks at Raging Menace, as well as changes to various menubar displays and text for readability and general cleanup. The developer has also reordered the memory pie chart to place wired at the start of the graph. For the many bugs fixed in MenuMeters 1.4 Beta 1, see the full changelog here.