iStat Mini

Bjango’s iStat Menus has been one of my must-have Mac apps for the past four years, but I have to admit that I don’t use all of its features. I don’t need iStat Menus’ comprehensive set of tools to monitor my CPU, fan temperature, or network usage – mostly because I don’t understand that data and just want to know how much free memory and storage I have.

iStat Mini, released last week on the Mac App Store, takes iStat Menus’ most popular features and puts them in Yosemite’s Today view with a compact widget that’s always a swipe away. iStat Mini will show you CPU, memory, and disk usage, with two smaller network indicators at the bottom for downloads and uploads. And that’s it.

If you’ve always been interested in iStat’s monitoring capabilities without the full power of iStat Menus, iStat Mini is a handy widget that covers the basics with a compact layout in Notification Center. Adopters of the app will likely ask for more features, and Bjango will have to balance requests for more options with the simplicity of the widget. A little more customization would be nice, but I wouldn’t want to see iStat Mini become as complex as iStat Menus.

iStat Mini is $1.99 on the Mac App Store.