In version 5.0, there’s a new nighttime clock face in the dropdown and, more importantly, the city database has been completely rebuilt with over 120,000 cities.
By combining a classic digital clock with a time zone reference tool, iStat Menus lets me quickly check the time for locations that I’m interested in, either for MacStories’ readership or my team.
Istat menus status fixme mac#
The other iStat Menus dropdown that I’ve been using for years and that I open several times each day when I’m at my Mac is the clock one. I asked Bjango’s Marc Edwards about the new menu bar in Yosemite, and he noted that “iStat Menus 4 sported quite a few features for use with Obsidian Menu Bar”, adding that “an official dark menubar mode in Yosemite has meant we can take things even further”. Plus, with per-app memory usage as a percentage of total memory (per-app information is new in version 5.0 and also available for CPU and disk activity), I can have an easier understanding of which app is doing what to my mid-2011 Air. It’s a little touch, but I like the personalization and the way colors pop on Yosemite’s dark menu bar. Or, if my battery is draining, I can set its icon to be purple instead of green. I like to keep a memory pie graph for my MacBook Air’s RAM, and by clicking the icon I can show breakdowns and, if I want, choose custom colors for wired, active, and compressed memory (the latter a new feature for OS X 10.9 and above). What’s better about this customization now is that it looks great with Yosemite’s dark menu bar. The app has already been tested with 10.10’s new dark menu bar, which is a welcome replacement to the popular third-party Obsidian Menu Bar hack. In iStat Menus, you can customize the colors of the app’s icons – with the new version, you can switch to Yosemite’s dark menu bar mode and set dark dropdowns. iStat Menus 5.0 doesn’t change the basic interaction or my preference for Bjango’s take.
I like the convenience of avoiding a trip to Activity Monitor when I need to figure out what’s consuming too much RAM, and, overall, I prefer Bjango’s widgets to Apple’s. I don’t need all the information and status reports that iStat Menus can give me, but I’ve been keeping the app’s time, battery, and memory icons in my menu bar for years now.
Istat menus status fixme series#
The premise of iStat Menus hasn’t changed with this release: by deeply integrating with OS X and Mac hardware, iStat Menus places a series of icons in your menu bar that can be clicked to reveal dropdowns with information and graphs for CPU and memory usage, network access and consumption, battery life and health, disk space and read/write times, and even time zones and calendar events. iStat Menus isn’t an app I constantly interact with, but it’s always there in my Mac’s menu bar, and it’s one of my must-have apps that I mention every year. I’ve never used all of the functionalities that iStat Menus offers, but I rely on a couple of menus that have been tastefully crafted to strike a balance between polished UI and utility. Two years after the release of version 4.0, Bjango has launched iStat Menus 5 today, adding hundreds of new features and improvements, and bringing a new design for both OS X Mavericks and Yosemite.
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