How to Display Memory Usage in a Dock Icon – Mac OS X

January 27, 2007 | Posted in OS X | 88 Comments »

This is a quick way to have easy visual access to your memory usage without having to rely on a Dashboard Widget, or even have Dashboard running for that matter. And you don’t have to download anything. This comes standard with every new Mac running OS X.

Being involved with web design, and design in general, I find myself needing to monitor my memory usage on a daily basis. (mostly because of heavy Adobe Apps) If you are like me, you want to know how much of your precious memory you have left, so as not to launch that one extra application that crashes your machine and causes you to lose unsaved work. Mac OS X ships standard with an application called “Activity Monitor,” Located in your Applications > Utilities folder. By keeping this application in your dock, you can simply Control + click on it’s dock icon and display a number of different charts to visualize the data, without keeping the application window itself open!

The Activity Monitor Dock Icon can display any of the following options, but only 1 at a time.

CPU Usage, CPU History, Network Usage, Disk Activity, or Memory Usage.

Set Up:

1. First, navigate to your Applications > Utilities folder, find the Activity Monitor application, and drag it’s icon onto your dock and release. This is what the Activity Monitor Icon looks like:

Activity Monitor Icon

2. Control Click (right click) on the Activity Monitor Dock Icon and select the Data Set you would like it to display, “Memory Usage” in my case. Note: Not all of the options display a pie chart. If you choose CPU Usage, it shows a bar that animates in real time similar to a band equalizer on stereo equipment.

Select the Data you want to be displayed

3. You should then see the icon display a chart

You should then see the icon display a chart

4. The Colors: These categories change depending on which set of data being displayed, but here is what the colors stand for, as far as Memory Usage goes.

What the colors stand for

I hope this simple tip makes your life a little “Bitt” easier. :)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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88 Responses to “How to Display Memory Usage in a Dock Icon – Mac OS X”

  1. oli May 29, 07 at 12:05 pm

    hi.

    sorry, but when i right-click i can’t select data sets… am i doing something wrong? i use mac os x 10.4.9. thanks for ur help, greets oli

  2. kc Jun 1, 07 at 12:53 pm

    oli, you need to first run the application before you can see the display data

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    you need to first run the application before you can see the display data

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