Faraday is a simple application for monitoring the status of your Powerbook battery. The display has three sections showing the current battery voltage, the current CPU speed and a counter which displays how long you have been running without your Powerbook plugged in.
There is only one menu. The file menu which has two items. The first lets you choose what you want Faraday to display. You can have the voltage alone, the voltage and the CPU speed, or the voltage and the CPU speed and the timer. The second item is the quit item. This causes Faraday to switch to a little known mode of the power manager which causes the battery to reach meltdown! No seriously it just quits the program, after all we are conforming to Apple's user interface guidelines.
The best way to use faraday is to put it into your startup items folder and let it start up when you reboot your Powerbook. It takes up only a very small amount of desktop real estate and is fully multifinder friendly, so you can leave it running all of the time. It only requires 35K of RAM and a meagre 14K on disk. Now that's what I call small.
About the display.
The only part of the display that really needs explaining is the first section showing the battery voltage and charging status.
The current battery voltage is shown and the following this is a character showing the status of the power adapter and battery power level. If the charger is plugged in you will see '•'. When the charger is unplugged you will see '°'. If the battery level falls so that you are running on reserve power the '°' will change to 'º',( this can also be thought of as a sideways lo :-). After these symbols you will see the word 'HI' if the battery is charging at the high rate. You can sometimes also get this even when the charger is unplugged. This is not a bug in Faraday but maybe one in the PowerManager? . The final symbol that you might see is '*' this will follow the HI and indicates that the battery is failing to charge correctly. This symbol will also be accompanied by a system beep sound.
About the counter.
The counter is reset each time you plug in the power adapter, even for a short time. If you put you powerbook to sleep while it is unplugged then the time it is asleep is not added to the counter so the counter represents the duration of your battery only session.
If you find any bugs or problems with Faraday then please let me know. If you have any suggestions for improvements then I'd like to hear them, but I cannot promise that I will be able to implement them.
Send Reports to:
Peter Hardman. Email phardman@ssci.liv.ac.uk or hpj@cxa.dl.ac.uk.
Redpoint Software Tel +44 (0)61 275 4640 (week-days)
Faraday is free. Please feel free to distribute it provided that this documentation is also included and that no charge is made for it other than duplication costs.
This may be included on any CD's or collections of Shareware software.
