We’re all familiar with the awesome dashboard widget ‘iStat Pro’. It’s one of the first things you install on your Mac. It’s so well designed, and super useful that one would be a fool not to install it. Unless, you have an iPhone (who doesn’t!).
Bjango, the same folks who bring us iStat Pro on the desktop, have made this taken it to the iPhone. If Apple ever makes a separate category for stupendously awesome user interfaces on the App Store, iStat would definitely feature in the list.
Monitor your iPhone
iStat serves several functions. At the local level, it can monitor your iPhone. It looks at memory, free space, uptime, and displays your MAC address along with the iPhone’s Unique Identifier. You can also email the UID and MAC ID of your iPhone, which I find very useful if I’m on the road and want to send the UID to a developer.
iStat also has a ‘free memory’ feature. I’m not sure how useful this is, or whether it really works (for the speeding up your iPhone). In my tests it has been able to free up anywhere from 10-20MB, which is huge considering the iPhone has 64MB of onboard memory. I suppose this will help if you’re attempting to play a heavy 3D game after putting the iPhone through a lot.
Monitor your Mac
Once you install the iStat server on your Mac, iStat will connect over Bonjour (on the same network) or the internet (once you’ve set up your router port forwarding) to display your Mac stats in real time! You get almost all of the functions of the iStat Pro widget for your desktop right on your iPhone. The stats update in real time so there’s no refreshing to do. I can tell people find it damn impressive with the iPhone on the dock, displaying your Mac stats while you’re working on some code.
Ping and Traceroute
I’m no networking guru, but I have some idea of what ping is. I tried pinging my iMac, and it worked flawlessly. No idea what traceroute is, tried it, and I’ve not seen a report where it has failed to work. Networking gurus, hopefully you will find this useful.
Beauty at its best
iStat may not be the ultimate app you use every day, but the clean user interface, the semi usefulness of the ‘free memory’ tool, and the fact that you no longer look like an idiot for not installing the free desktop widget, makes the $1.99 totally worth it.
