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Friday Favorite: How iStat Menus saved my MacBook Pro from burning up
Early last week, my 2011 MacBook Pro started acting up. The fan was spinning wildly and the aluminum case was hot to the touch. So hot that it left red marks where it was resting on my legs and the laptop shut itself down. I fired it back up again, shut down some of the extra apps that usually run in the background and kept working. Things cooled down inside my MBP, so I just brushed it off as an unusual combination of warm weather and excess apps. I was wrong -- the next morning and again the next evening I experienced the same overheating. To help diagnose the problem, I turned to iStat Menus from Bjango to see what was going on underneath the hood of my Mac. iStat Menus is perfect for diagnosing problems as it tracks a wide variety of statistics for your Mac. The app sits in your menu bar and can track your CPU & GPU usage, memory usage, disk activity, network activity, battery level and sensor readings like temperature. I picked iStat Menus because it was the first one I found that measured hardware as well as software. I was interested in fan speed, which is measured by iStat and not by built-in tools like Apple's Activity Monitor. My previous laptop overheated due to a bad CPU fan, so I initially thought I was dealing with a hardware problem again. I was able to put CPU die temperature (which once climbed to 99°C before my MBP shut down), CPU proximity temperature and exhaust (fan speed) in my menu bar and monitor them simultaneously. This let me watch the fan speed ramp up as the temperature went up, so I knew something else was awry. I then watched the CPU usage using iStat Menus and in just a few minutes, I was able to determine it was a software issue. I singled out TweetDeck as the culprit that was maxing out my CPU and driving my temperature upward. As soon as I force quit the Twitter client, I watched my MBP CPU temperature fall back down to a comparatively cool 50°C. My problems started soon after Tweetdeck was updated on June 14, 2013, but I can't lay the blame on Tweetdeck as I am running OS X Mavericks. I expect wonky behavior like this when I am using beta software. For a few days, I stopped using Tweetdeck and started using it again when OS X Mavericks beta 2 arrived. I am happy to report that this latest build of OS X is Tweetdeck-friendly, and my MBP is now running like a champ again. iStat Menus is available for US$16 from Bjango's website. There is a free 14-day trial so you can check it out before you buy it.
Sideways Racing from Bjango looks great, plays not so
Sideways Racing from Bjango is another example of a reinvented old-school top-down racing game for the iPad. You might know Bjango as the developer of one of the most well-known Mac system monitor programs iStat Menus. Sideways Racing is the company's first foray into iOS gaming.
A hands-on look at iStat Menus 3
During the summer of 2008, I was using my MacBook Air outside on a very hot (102°F in the shade) day when I noticed that the laptop seemed to have slowed down to the point that it was almost unusable. Fortunately, I had installed iSlayer's iStat, and I was able to tell at a glance that one of the cores of the Core 2 Duo processor had shut down. Sure enough, a quick look around the Web pointed out that other MacBook Air owners were running into similar problems in "warm" conditions. Cooling off the MBA resolved the issue (and made me a lot cooler, too!), and I've never had the problem since. That one occurrence taught me the value of a tool like iStat, so the application has been on my Macs ever since. Now comes iStat Menus 3, the latest version of the venerable Mac monitoring application. The company name has changed -- it's now Bjango -- but the product still remains a useful tool for those of us who like to keep an eye on the internal workings of our Macs. I recently bought iStat Menus 3 to install on a new i7 iMac, so here are some of my first impressions of the app.
TUAW Exclusive: Darkness 2.0 First Look
Bjango, developer of the awesome iStat for iPhone, is readying the next version of one of its most successful iPhone apps, Darkness (iTunes link). TUAW got a chance to play with Darkness 2.0, which should be hitting the App Store in the next couple of days, and we explored what is new and improved.Darkness is a world clock on steroids. Not only does it give you the current time for pretty much any city in the world, it also lets you know what time the sun rises and sets, alongside other specific information such as the the phase of the moon.Darkness 2.0 is a complete rewrite, sporting a new interface and some enhanced features. For photographers, Darkness is a really, really useful tool because it tells you where the sun or moon will be at any given time. you can also find out the exact time that solar noon (the time of day when the sun appears its highest) will occur in your location, so you can help plan for the best time to take certain shots.World ClockDarkness offers up a nice way to quickly glance at what time it is in various places all over the world. Sure, the built in World Clock can do the same thing, but Darkness gives you more accessible information (the day for instance) and can access your current location, which is great if you happen to be traveling across timezones.You can also easily choose to view the time in military or 12-hour intervals, and tell at a glance at what time sunrise and sunset is in any given city. You can add your own city from Bjango's large database (more than 8500 cities) or you can enter in your exact coordinates if you live off the grid or something.%Gallery-49386%
