Battery Monitor 1.7
Device: Mac OS
Category: Utilities
Price: $4.99, Version: 1.6 -> 1.7 (iTunes)
Description:NOTE: A computer with a battery compliant with the Smart Battery standard is required. All portable Apple computers with Intel processors fulfill this requirement.
More and more computers are mobile devices nowadays. The most important prerequisite for a portable computer is a chargable battery which keeps the device powered. Batteries are not really cheap replacement parts and they are subject to wear and tear. Their lifetimes should be optimized, handling them with the necessary care. Battery Monitor is a small auxiliary application useful in this regard. It offers the following features:
- Display of the charge state in the Dock: This is useful if you cannot or do not like to use the display in the menubar of Mac OS X, e.g. when you have a screen which is not very wide.
- Display of internal battery information: In addition to the charge state, many other technical specifications, e.g. age, temperature, discharge current, number of charge cycles, expected lifetime, or capacity can be retrieved. The states of each of the battery cells and the manufacturer of the cells can also be determined.
- Capturing charge and discharge curves: The history of the readings measured by the battery unit can be displayed graphically. This way you can plot the charge and discharge curves, for example, one of the most important characteristics for the health of a battery. You can also review the graphical profile of the amperage drawn by the computer, helping to find “power guzzling applications”.
- Bookkeeping of the aging process of the battery: Battery Monitor automatically keeps a log about the charge capacity of the battery which will decrease as the battery ages. This helps you to exactly monitor how the behavior of the battery is changing over time. You can assess if your battery is working normally or if it might be defective. You can also estimate more exactly when the right time has come to purchase a new battery. For computers with replaceable battery units, Battery Monitor can of course monitor multiple battery packs at the same time.
- Notifications during charge or discharge: In addition to the display of the charge state in the Dock, Battery Monitor can optionally inform you about the progress of the charge or discharge process by other means. Inobtrusive notifications using speech or the Notification Center of OS X (10.8 or later only) can be set up.
What's New
- Added support for the latest portable MacBook computer models.
- Added new option to display the history for capacity readings as percentage values instead of using mAh.
- Added new feature to display the actual detail reading when clicking on a point on a history curve.
- Changed some default colors for history curves to optimize readability independent of the selected background color.
- Enhanced refresh behavior for the different output windows.
- To ensure full compatibility with OS X Mavericks, support for Growl notifications had to be removed.
- The reference manual has been revised and uses a new design.
Battery Monitor