Menu Utilities Collection v1.22
Copyright © 2006 by Ari Feldman
http://www.flyingyogi.com

This archive contains various freeware menu bar utilities in one package. Included in this release are:

HD Free

Displays the free and used space (displayed as a %) on your boot drive in the menu bar. The drive info is updated every 60 seconds to reflect any changes (e.g. you just deleted 2 GB worth of crap, etc.). I wrote this because there's no easy or fast way of finding out the free space on your main drive without constantly resorting to the 'Get Info' command.

¨

HD Free +

Displays the free and used space on all of your mounted drives (this includes any iPods configured as drives) in a drop down menu. The drive info is updated each time the HD Free + menu is selected reflect any changes.

¨

NOTE: Drives will also be listed in the order that they were mounted.

MenuIP

Displays your Mac's external IP address in the menu bar and polls the IP every 60 seconds. People may find this useful for doing things such as diagnosing their Internet connections and/or setting up email or web services, etc.

¨

NOTE: This tool assumes you're connected to an ethernet-based device as it only checks the default network interface en0.

MenuIP +

Displays your Mac's external IP address inside a drop down menu. Selecting the IP in the menu will automatically copy it to the Clipboard.

¨

NOTE: This tool works slightly differently than MenuIP as it checks an external URL to get your IP rather than relying on the value of network interface en0, which should allow it to report your IP correctly whether you're using an ethernet, WiFi or even dial-up connection.

MenuRAM

Displays the amount of free and used RAM by your Mac inside the menu bar were U is used RAM in Megabytes and F is free RAM in Megabytes. The menu is refreshed every 60 seconds to get the most accurate account of system RAM levels.

¨

NOTE: There is a minor issue with MenuRAM's calculation of free RAM when run after just rebooting your Mac. However, once you run a program, it seems to work as expected.

MenuRAM +

Displays the amount of free and used RAM by your Mac inside a drop down menu. The indicators are refreshed each time the menu is selected.

¨

NOTE: This tool isn't as accurate as MenuRAM because it doesn't update on regular intervals (updates are user initiated), however, I've provided it for users with smaller screens who want this type of info but don't want to sacrifice the screen real estate to get it.

NOTE: There is a minor issue with MenuRAM +'s calculation of free RAM when run after just rebooting your Mac. However, once you run a program, it seems to work as expected.

Process Tamer

Displays a list of all active application and system processes in a drop down menu. You can then kill them "nicely" (as opposed to terminate with extreme prejudice!) with one click. In many cases, Process Tamer will be more convenient that manually typing in individual process ID (PIDs) in the Terminal to accomplish the same thing.

Processes are sorted by their relative CPU use with the most processor intensive processes appearing at top. Information about the length a process has been running is also displayed. Process information is constantly changing during normal system use and this will be reflected every time the Process Tamer menu is selected.

¨

NOTE: Critical system processes won't appear in the menu nor will so-called "Zombie" processes. As this utility kills processes nicely, it won't kill all processes. Stubborn processes may still need to be killed via the Terminal using 'kill -9'.

SysLoad

Displays the current system "load" or CPU usage of your Mac, which can help you gauge just how busy your Mac is at any point in time. System load is polled in 1, 5 and 15 minute intervals and SysLoad updates itself every 60 seconds to reflect this. 

What is "normal" in terms of system load will vary greatly between systems and what type of applications you run. Generally speaking, higher numbers, particularly those on the left-most column means your system load is getting high. However, system load does range from 0-nnn where nnn is a three digit number so if your load is under 3.00 during any given sample, you're doing fine.

¨

NOTE: The method used to determine system load that most flavors of UNIX use, including BSD (on which OS X is based) is wildly inaccurate since it relies on averages. However, it is far from useless as it does give you a sense of the level of activity on your system.

SysUtils

Displays a list of all of the click-able applications in your Mac's /Applications/Utilities/ folder inside a drop down menu, which you can then launch with one click.

This can be handy as it allows you to free up precious Dock space when it comes to accessing important but sporadically used system utilities such as Grab, X11, Disk Utility, etc. What's more, you can place other utility applications in your /Applications/Utilities/ folder and they will show up in the menu the next time it's activated.

¨

yCal

Displays a calendar of the current year inside a drop down menu. This is useful if trying to find out what day-of-the-week your birthday falls on, etc.

¨

System Requirements:

All of these programs should run on Mac OS X 10.3 or better, although I have 10.48 so there are no guarantees it will work on your Mac.

Installation, Starting, Stopping & Removal:

	•	To install, simply drag the application(s) of interest into your Mac's /Applications/ folder.
	•	To launch, simply double-click on the application's icon.
	•	To quit, simply select the application's Quit option, which appears in the menu.
	•	To remove, simply drag the application(s) of interest into your Mac's Trash. However, make sure you quite the application(s) in question before you empty the Trash (i.e. they may still be running, etc.).

NOTE: If you like any of these programs and want to have them start up automatically at login, simply enable them via the 'Accounts' applet in the 'System Preferences' application.

License Info:

All of these applications are completely free to use and distribute as long as the copyrights and the programs remain intact. Use them as you wish. And, although I use them myself, I make no guarantees or warranties of any kind regarding their performance or safety. Therefore, use them at your own risk! 

Technical Notes:

All of these applications are written using BSD commands, Perl and/or awk. That's why they're so small. They're actually 1-2 lines of code executed by commands or languages that ship with every modern version of OS X. I then use a nifty program called Tapir (http://www.sveinbjorn.org/tapir) to wrap them into a nice OS X-like menu interface.

Tapir is a PPC application but the scripts themselves run at the native speed on your host Mac, thus, you get good performance regardless if you have a PPC or Intel-Mac.

Version History:

1.0 - Initial Release

1.1 - Update

	•	Updated yCal to use only an icon in the menu bar
	•	Updated the formatting of HD Free + to display full drive names and be more compact in the menu bar

1.11 - Update

	•	Updated Menu + to obtain the external IP address using an alternate method from MenuIP and reduced the size of its entry in the menu bar.
	•	Improved performance of HD Free + so it's much faster and uses fewer resources when run on slower machines.

1.2 - Update

	•	Added MenuRAM to the collection.

1.21 - Update

	•	Added MenuRAM + to the collection.

1.22 - Update
	
	•	Made the contents of the HD Free + menu more compact to take up less room on screen.
	•	Made the MenuRAM display a bit more compact to take up less room on screen.
	•	Updated SysUtils to display only an icon in the menu bar to free up space.
	•	Removed UpTime from the distribution until some formatting bugs are resolved.