Eyeballing Your Stats With iPulse
Are you one of those obsessive folks who repeatedly checks the Activity Monitor to see just how much memory iTunes is eating up? The popular widgets iStat pro and iStat nano bring this information to the Dashboard, but what about putting it right on your desktop? This is just what Iconfactory’s iPulse aims to do.
iPulse is a very interesting concept for an app. Its primary function is to display all kinds of information about your system stats, including memory usage, hard drive reads and writes, network activity, and CPU load, among others. The trick is that iPulse delivers all this information in a little round widget that sits not in your Dashboard, but on your desktop. Only when you hover over different parts of the widget do the specific stats appear. This is a simple and elegant solution to the problem of monitoring systems stats.
The iPulse widget displays your stats in three distinct rings, each divided into two half-rings. This unique display gives you a quick way to see all your systems stats at a glance without even moving your mouse, if you’re familiar with iPulse’s interface. Here’s where the real issue comes in – I found iPulse’s default interface to be very muddled and confusing. Even after spending a bit of time with the app, I still couldn’t tell what was happening with my system without hovering over the widget to see more info. Even after trying all the included “jackets” (the term for iPulse skins), I still couldn’t find one I liked. In fact, out of all the ten pages of jackets available for iPulse, only one (”Raised,” pictured in my screenshot above, and available here) made it really easy for me to discern my system stats with only a glance.
After tweaking with iPulse’s preferences for a while, I found two ways to make the app much more useful for me, and these might apply to you as well. The first way was to decrease the time between iPulse’s refreshes. The default is one second, but when I changed to the lowest setting of 0.1 second, I found that iPulse became more of what it promised to be: a real-time view of my stats. The downside to this is that lowering the refresh time causes iPulse itself to use more CPU cycles.
The second way to increase iPulse’s functionality is to put a stats gauge in your menu bar. For those of you who just can’t wrap your head around the truly robust view of your stats that iPulse gives you, the menu bar gauge will still let you keep an eye on your stats in a much more simple and refined way.
Overall, iPulse is a very powerful app that is truly a work of art in both code and design. It’s not something I would see myself using all day, every day, but for you stats freaks out there, iPulse may be just the thing you were looking for.
iPulse is $12.95. Get it here.
I agree that iPulse is very confusing. I find using the free MenuMeters is much better and offers greater control. Great app, get it here: http://www.macdownloads.com/info.php/id/10451
I’ve been using iPulse for a while, and what makes it easy for me is the ability to display numbers for the different sections, so that I can see what the CPU usage is without having to gauge the size each time.
I beg to differ on the usability of iPulse. I downloaded, paid and installed iPulse because of my blind faith on Iconfactory’s geekery and design, but was much disappointed. Unlike other stat displaying options such as istat pro that sit comfortably in the dashboard, iPulse is on the desktop all the time. Now this might not be too much of an issue for ACD users or large screen users, but is surely a waste of screen estate for users on ibook and powerbooks that have limited space.
For usability, it’s quite irritating to go to iPulse and hover over each and every circular band (unless u remember which one is for temp and which for process) and wait for stats to appear. This is simplified by enabling text options on the bands, but still causes issues when you are working on something important and have to hover over the damn thing to check your processes. It’s a pity that iconfactory concentrated too much on design and forgot about usability on this one.
Despite looking nice and all, i feel that you need to do two ore more steps w/ ipulse to accomplish the same objective with istat pro widget; that is occasionally you need to press F11 to show your desktop, hover your mouse to ipulse to get the info, not even counting the fact that you need to “guess” which jacket/ring is for what stats. I just dont want to go through those unnecessary steps. w/ iStat Pro, pressing F12 and boom, you get all the stats info you need. simple. doesnt make your grey matter perform much computation.
Yeah, as I said, I found myself pretty dissatisfied with the overall usability of iPulse, but I don’t really check on my system stats all that much anyway.
iPulse makes me mad. First of all, it shouldn’t be kept in the dock. It should just have maybe a menu item. Like DeskShade, Twitterrific, MenuMeters (my fave), and Alarm Clock. Besides, you can easily activate Dashboard developer mode and just drag iStat to the desktop. + There is also iStat Pro(?) which is an app that basically clones the widget and it runs as an actual application.
people only check their stats if something is fishy, going south, or doesnt feel right. Other than that, people have important productive stuffs to do than staring or got awed at “numbers”
there is a version of iStat that does not sits in your dashboard but on your desktop as an app, over st islayer.com
windows makes it easy. ctrl+alt+del!