I figure I’ll make this a series. One of my favourite free apps on the Mac is XRG. As a long time UNIX geek, I go crazy if I can’t keep an eye on what my machine is up to. XRG keeps me sane. 
I align it horizontally in the bottom corner of my 20″ widescreen at work, but place it vertically on my 17″ LCD at home:
This looks really nice, but a little heavy on the screen real-estate. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to check out Alex Harper’s excellent Menu Meters, which puts everything into the menu bar:
Yeah, I’ve used Menu Meters as well. It’s also excellent. I can’t put my finger on why exactly, but for some reason I don’t like having much stuff up in the menu bar. Feels cluttered, or something. That being said, I do like being able to see what’s going on without having to bring the window to the foreground. For that reason I wish XRG (like activity monitor and iPulse) had an updating Dock icon for, say, one of the meters.
Note that XRG can be as big / small as you want, and you can choose from a bunch of different “boxes” to display. I actually turn most of them off.
I suspect my affection for XRG might be related to the fact that I’ve always had systems / network graphs running under X11 displays. So XRG probably feels more warm and comfortable to me than, say, someone who doesn’t come from a UNIX background.
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VMUNIX Blues is written by me, Mark Mayo, in Vancouver, BC. I like unix, coding, and the web, and naturally most articles I write here have something to do with what I like. If commenting on an article isn’t your style, you can always email me — mark (at) vmunix.com.
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