Jul 19 2009
Life with Mac – The Tweaks
No matter how good an operating system gets in a default install, there’s always little things that niggle or don’t work quite the way you expect. While I’ve tried to embrace “the way of the Mac” and not uneccesarily load up my MacBook there’s some things I just couldn’t seem to live without.
After a couple of years using Vista I’d come to like the sidebar for it’s ability to provide information “at a glance”. In particular, it’s nice to be able to see basic system performance information like CPU load, RAM usage and system temperature – knowing this stuff helps understand if a system performance issue has an obvious cause.
I also miss having a drive activity indicator. From some web searching it seems clear that Apple industrial design considers a drive activity LED to be superfluous. In some ways I agree, things are either working or they’re not. However, when I run an application, if I can’t see it loading it’s nice to at least see some drive activity to know that it has started.
It turns out that both of these niggles had, for me, the same solution. A nice little tool called iStat menus. This terrific little utility adds a few (user customiseable) extra items to the menu bar at the top of the screen. In my example at left, I’ve added temperature, hard drive, RAM and CPU information.
Each one of these items can have a drop down menu attached to it that provides further information related to that item – in my example image, it’s showing additional information on hard drive storage.
I’ve found iStat menus has really helped me with those small visual queues about the health of my MacBook and helped my effective use through giving me a visual indication that something’s actually happening even if there isn’t (yet) a splash screen or other indication of, for example, a program that’s loading.
Another one of those all important little tools that I needed is Synergy. This great little program shares a keyboard and mouse between multiple computers over a network. I normally have a Windows desktop (well, it’s monitor, anyway) beside the MacBook and prefer to use just one keyboard and mouse on both computers when I can.
I started out trying to install the standard Mac version of Synergy and found it looking far more complex than it seemed to need to be. Some further research turned up an alternative version designed for Mac. While it appears not to have been updated for a while but I’ve not found any issues with it on OSX Leopard.
The last major “must have” for me was the ability to monitor Internet usage on my ISP (Internode). As with other aspects of these tweaks, I really wanted something that was visible at a glance during normal use. The solution I found was NodeToad – a nice little tool that puts an icon in the menu bar with an indicator of Internet usage.
As with iStat menus, the tool can be configured for how it displays this status and also has a drop-down with further information (as pictured) about current and historical usage.
Next up in this I’ll look at my experiences with Parallels and XP on the MacBook.
