Their new utility is not a widget, but instead it runs on your Menu bar, iStat Menus. A similar utility has been out for a long time, MenuMeters. I have been a user of MenuMeters since coming back to the Mac. Like iStat Menus, it also runs in the Menu bar, and it is able to display system information that you may like to be able to easily monitor. Things like network upload and download rates, hard drive activity, cpu load, memory usage, etc. As I looked at iStat Menus today, I bring with me a familiarity and fondness for MenuMeters, I think that this gives me a good background instead of never having used this type of program previously.

Here are my initial impressions of iStat Menu:

It is an elegant implementation, the Preferences are simply gorgeous.

It also looks great on your Menu bar.

You have a high degree of customizability with regards to what you choose to show on your Menu bar. I have mine setup to show the Hard Drive icon, and there are arrows for drive activity, an UP arrow on the drive indicates a read, and a down arrow a write. Next is my CPU temp, the Date and Time information, network transfer rates, and CPU usage. There are many other items you can choose to show as well.

I like the date and time section so much that I turned off the Tiger Data & Time section that I had previously been showing on my Menu bar, iStat Menus shows the same information more concisely, and you can also click on the Calendar icon / Time and you will get a quick drop down calendar.

While I really like the look of the calendar above, the fact that it matches the look of the Menu bar, I'm not so crazy about the look of the other drop down information panels. They look great in their own right, but they contrast with the Menu bar, and the Unified look coming to Leopard.

There are really only two things right now that I kind of miss from MenuMeters, one is that MenuMeters CPU usage showed System and User usage on the graphs while iStat Menus only shows total in the graph, though it does show the breakdown in the drop down panel. The other item is that I liked being able to configure red and green lights to represent drive read/write activity. The arrows on the drive icon represent the same thing, I just prefer the larger color icons from Menu Meters. I'm sure I'll get used to the arrows though. Yes, that's correct, I've switched over to iStat Menus, and I'm not using MenuMeters any longer. This is a really nice utility and I'm already enjoying it quite a bit!

By the way, I just got a note from the developer and they are considering having a different look for the drop down panels in the future, I would guess with a color scheme that more represents the Calendar drop down. Great news.

iStat Menus is freeware, but remember that donations for all this hard work is greatly appreciated. I'm donating $5 right now - this is really nice and I'll use it every day. Maybe more would be fair? At least it's something.