If you’re a power user, you no doubt want to keep an eye on what’s going on with every aspect of your Mac. Even if you’re just a regular Mac user, you probably keep an eye on how much hard drive space is being used or how much bandwidth you’re using.
With ever Mac comes an application called Activity Monitor. You may not even know that it exists. Go to the /Applications/Utilities folder, and look for the icon. When you launch it it will display a window with five tabs: CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage, and Network. This is a hassle-free way to keep up with the vital stats of your Mac, but there are third-party applications that offer different, perhaps better, ways of viewing the data.
I’ll tell you what, iSlayer has got you covered in this arena. They have an app for your menu bar, two for your dashboard, and even one for your iPhone. iSlayer’s iStat line of applications gives you a myriad of ways to view the same data, but maybe you’re looking for a more elegant solution.
Enter Panic Software‘s Stattoo. This is a $12.95 application that overlays some computer statistics on top of your desktop. To be fair, it does a fair bit more than that. It displays other things like the weather and RSS feeds. Think of it as something like a mini-dashboard of its own.
So now you have a choice between a few different options. Try them all out and see what works best for you. Comment here or hit me up on Twitter to let me know what solution you like best and why.
Photo Credit: *saxon*