Here’s an app I never thought I’d needed until someone sent me a link to it.

Whenever I first launch Safari, I generally open up Twitter, our Mint stats, this site. I’m sure there are many of you who open up Google Reader, Facebook, as well as your web mail service. What I’m saying is that we all have these few websites that we have to visit every so often. Of course, I’ve discussed moving them off the browser, and into their own app space using something like Fluid. However, if you’re looking for separation of these activities from your main browsing activites, while not creating clutter on your desktop, Monitor is what you’ve been looking for.

What is it exactly? It’s basically webkit being rendered in 6 different fixed tabs. The tabs suggest Mail, Twitter, Reader, Analytics, Blog, and eCommerce, but you can set the tab url and name, and from thereon, it stays that way. But then again, it’s never that simple is it! Monitor understands that these few sites that you visit so often need to be made rich, and be kept up to date. I mean, who wants to view web stats that are more than 30 minutes old? So it will auto-refresh tabs every so often. It also auto-hides when you give focus to another app, so clutter is also rid of.

From a usage point of view, I couldn’t be more excited about Monitor. It’s also super fast, and keeps Safari from hogging a ton of memory. It’s also got a full screen view which basically hides the menubar and Dock and expands to the screen width, useful if you’re catching up on Google Reader. And at any point, you can spring down the url bar and visit any url you want. It’s even got a built in file downloader.

Monitor has got two additional tabs for Notes and Todos, which reside locally. To be frank, while these two are awesome concepts to have alongside your ‘regular’ browsing tabs, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a lot going on for no reason at all. And a ton of space wasted. Notes does float along in its own space conscious palette, but its implementation is still ‘meh’.

The UI is strewn about for the notes

To speak of other drawbacks, I would have to say it’s the change in font. I don’t know what reason the developer has, but Monitor automatically renders fonts in miniscule sizes, for all web text. If you go to increase that font size, the entire design is broken, with extra leading filled in all over. I tried to play around with the settings, but to no effect. There needs to be a “leave my fonts alone!” option somewhere. Another complaint is there’s no clear connection between Monitor and Safari, especially when it comes to opening links. Another big issue, is that if the ‘refresh’ fails to make a connection, you’re shown a ‘couldn’t fine server page’. Unfortunately, that page is actually a local html file, so if you refresh again, all you’re refreshing is the error page itself.

A 1:1 pixel screenshot of what fonts look like by default

Coming in at the sweet price of free, Monitor is a great app to keep a clear separation from ‘browsing’ and ‘monitoring’. Mature at v2.5, in the sense that it doesn’t crash, snappy performance, and looks decent. If only those quibbles of mine were solved. Go download.