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MyBattery 3.3.7 ($10 Shareware) With many of the Observer staff sporting PowerBooks (your author is writing this on his shiny new PowerBook G3 (FireWire) 400 MHz), the topic of battery conservation is coming up more and more. The Lithium Ion batteries in the recent PowerBooks are the most advanced ever, providing longer charge times and not suffering from the dreaded "memory" effect of earlier batteries. But if you don't configure your system properly, you can run down you batteries in no time. Mac OS does provide some basic tools to help monitor battery status and usage. The Date & Time Control Panel, oddly enough, has an option to show the amount of remaining battery life and the charging status. And there's the Battery Monitor Control Strip, which shows the battery level and charging status for both the left and (optional) right batteries. The Control Strip also has battery consumption monitor, and an estimate of the time before you need to find a wall outlet. MyBattery offers a wealth of features that will tell you just about everything you need to know about factors that can affect your battery consumption. The first is a spiffy display which you can customize with the information that you'd like to be displayed. Some of the more interesting values include relative battery level, percentage battery remaining, battery voltage level, time elapsed, time remaining, hard drive status and processor temperature.
Lots of Information About Your System and Batteries In addition to all of this great information, by paying the modest shareware fee of $10, you get even more features. The most interesting feature is a history of your left battery and right battery charge, and the processor temperature. This can help you determine what activities are causing high battery drain or high processor temperature, so you can adjust your system setting or work habits accordingly.
View Your Left Battery, Right Battery and Temperature History In addition to the cool history features, other features that you get when you pay the shareware fee are the ability to display system status icons in the right and left menu bar areas, support for multiple batteries, the ability to customize battery names, and e-mail notification of new versions of MyBattery. For PowerBook owners who want to know the nitty gritty behind their battery consumption, MyBattery provides all the details you'll ever need. Have any other Mac OS Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via e-mail, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum. |
