A long time ago I ran a CPU load meter app called Spy. It ran in the menu bar and had a funky way of displaying current and long-term load. Alas, it was not an open source app and the original author disappeared off the face of the earth. I kept a copy of the app around for others to download until it broke with the 10.4 upgrade.
So I finally had to look for something to replace it. Unsanity’s Cee Pee You was ok but only did current load, not long-term load. In fact, that’s something I found with just about every CPU load app that ran in the menu bar. Then I found Menu Meters.
Something that’s bugged me for ages with Menu Meters is it’s inability to recognise the CPU in my MacBook Pro. It says that I’ve got 2 Intel 80486 CPUs running at 2.00 GHz. To be fair though, it does this because Mac OS X tells it that I’ve got that particular CPU. It seems that Apple never bothered to update the Gestalt functions after the switch to Intel CPUs and they never bothered to update the NeXT CPU info functions to support chips newer than the Pentium 4. I did manage to find a suitable string via sysctl. Since Menu Meters is open source, I could go ahead and fix this annoyance myself.
The patch I created is here (watch out! I’m not very experienced with Cocoa so there could be bugs in that).
On my machine the end result looks like this.
Not quite the “Intel Core Duo @ 2.00GHz” that I’d like to see but I wasn’t about to implement a model to marketing string conversion map. I know that T2500 means Core Duo so it’s fine for me.
Hmm… It seems Spy came back though I have to wonder if a new version is ever going to be released. I think I’ll take a look at the code. Maybe I can graft the circular display that Spy used onto Menu Meters…
Update 6 August 2008
So it seems the Spy author was busy, at least for a while. I can build and run the version in CVS and it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to do. It looks a tad different and it has the same “80486″ bug that Menu Meters has but I’ve already figured out how to fix that :)
