Show HN: Pluto – macOS system monitor app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pluto – macOS system monitor app

apps.apple.com

158 pointslupinglade101 comments

Check out our new system monitor app "Pluto", it's a different take on at-a-glance availability and is very customizable.

Mac App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pluto-hud/id1544577573?mt=12

Promo codes below:

36F3FWR6W6NJ HKHLWTMHHP7P 3YHKK9XFWHRE XX9WJX3HNKLR LTJ6YL343RM4

Update: here are 10 more codes for you guys, thanks for the support!

REF3KY37YXHP Y4L77PPLLFTH R6HEJALF67YM 93FYNH3YXALL FWHMPFHF3XHR KJ3RYH7JK639 JL49PFKFKWYN NH4HXY7KM6XH 94E777T7449Y HEPT4TW6KWKJ

Thanks for the code!

To anyone reading: all these codes seem to have been used up :(

Just posted some new ones.

Wow, that went fast.

I believe bots scrape the internet for these, unfortunately :(

I assume these codes are limited to just this app? What would the bots do with individual licenses?

resell them on various sites for < MSRP

Once they’ve been used?

I presume they would claim them with fake/fresh username/email info to get legitimate licenses/keys, then resell those after the fact.

You get the app directly, no key you can resell.

The codes worked, I claimed the third one of the second set I think about three minute after they were added to the post. At that point at least six of the other codes were gone.

Hello, codes seems ko

Darn. Missed the new ones too!

never have luck with this stuff ;D

I always miss out on this stuff too. Always late to the party.

You can spend $10 :) It's like 2 coffees. Not that much and not a subscription :)

For those reading, this is likely in reference to Sugarbucks (Starbucks) “coffee”. Brewing at home with a pot or even an espresso machine is approx <$1 per cup.

Technically you're right. Can't argue!

Depends how big your cups are ;-)

I don’t know about you all, but I like huge cups of coffee.

I get picky and relatively pricey beans and distribute a French press across one giant mug and one travel mug for heat preservation. Anyway yeah it works out to about $1/vessel.

This dashboard won't cure the caffeine withdrawal headaches. I'll still need to buy the coffee.

I respect your approach to advertising. This was well executed :)

Do you also sell it outside the app store?

Could you send one to simone.brunozzi at (google's email service) ?

Slightly off topic, but fully related. Has anyone ever noticed that when your CPU is spiking on a Mac, simply opening Activity Monitor often brings it in check? Please tell me I haven’t fabricated this correlation! I’ve noticed it on several generations of MBA’s, with the 2020 Intel as the most recent.

I haven't noticed that, but I'd propose an alternate explanation: the amount of time it takes for you to notice a CPU spike, get annoyed by it, and launch task manager ends up being just slightly shorter than the running time of some common CPU spiking tasks.

oh yeah, I caught addressbooksync maxing out four cores for about a minute on htop before.

100% this on my rMBP 2015. Almost every time too. I notice my PC will give a similar 'system interrupts' reaction with Task Manager, however.

On Windows some scheduled tasks are scheduled to run whenever the system is idle, and seem to stop running when the system is being used again (e.g. by opening a task manager). Maybe the same is true on Mac.

This behavior does make one think of malware. It's frustrating when the core features of an OS thwart user monitoring and control, even if inadvertently.

Yep, many many times on my 2017 MBP. Far too consistently repeatable to be coincidence, IMO.

If Activity Monitor runs with a higher priority/niceness, that could explain it

I just keep activity monitor open all the time. I've noticed that fan speed significantly lags CPU load, so it's difficult to notice and react in time. The one that gives me the most trouble is mds_store, or the spotlight search indexing process. I disable indexing on basically the whole drive but it still spins up the fans every once in a while.

On the subject of system performance on macOS… does anyone know of a decent app/tool for limiting CPU on different processes or programs?

This might be less relevant on newer hardware, but I'm interested in limiting certain apps (e.g., Dropbox, OS tools) from heating up the computer and making the fans go crazy.

You can use the renice command from the command line, after finding the applications pid:

http://cheat.sh/renice

I like to use htop `brew install htop` and then play with nice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_(Unix) for "bad" processes).

Give AppPolice a try: https://github.com/AppPolice/AppPolice

Not on a mac right now, is there an alternative page that shows the UI, the screenshots on the app store in firefox are tiny.

I was too wondering why the screenshots are so low res... is it because I have some apple domains blocked like ocsp?

nope, you’re seeing correctly - it’s a very low-functionality site that’s primary role is to open the App Store app (only works from Safari, I believe). The full images are available in the appstore.

I remember there being a great Safari extension that blocked this behavior. I wish I knew of something that could do this after Apple nuked their entire ecosystem :(

You can see a couple of screenshots here: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/kprd2g/unique_new_...

It would be nice if you would add that you are plugging one of your own applications.

Same situation for me, I ended up adjusting the image urls from the page to get a better look:

https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/PurpleSource124/v4/...

https://is2-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/PurpleSource114/v4/...

Very nice :) I just bought it, this is a lot nicer to have around than switching back to the activity monitor.. I just recently got an m1 Mac air and since it's fanless and makes no obvious outside indication that something is busy it's hard to tell what's going on.

M1 Mac mini reporting in... I can't get the fan to turn on. And I'm compiling as hard as I can...

Oh boy, you just gave me another reason to want the Mac Mini M1. I have had two previous Mac Mini's (and one is actually still operational 24/7, despite being 12 years old). Such a brilliant little machine, and much better value than say an iMac as there are tons of good screens out there. I am wondering though whether it supports dual 4k screens at 60Hz. I don't think HDMI can do that, so it would have to be DisplayPort.

Apple says that the M1 Mac Mini supports:

> One display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz connected via Thunderbolt and one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz connected via HDMI 2.0

That is, it does support two 4K screens at 60 Hz.

Note that this is in contrast to the M1 MacBooks which only support one external display in addition to the laptop display.

M1 Macbooks reportedly support also 4k/120hz, and 4k/144hz/hdr with DSC, so it's quite possible that Mini would too

HDMI can do that, but unfortunately the M1 can't.

Not really - even if the computer could do it on its side, my relatively new 4K Dell screen does not support the HDMI standard required to do 60Hz. It does 30Hz but then I would rather use an old CRT.

I don't know what standard your monitor supports. But hdmi 2.1 can certainly do 4k@60. And most new devices and monitors are coming with hdmi 2.1 support.

If the monitor is more than a year old it's probably using technology that is 3 years old, etc. Then it means a lot of current monitors have this issue. But it will improve, so that's good.

- 2mb

- no data collection

- beautiful

i love macOS because devs on that platform embrace apple's mindset

on other hand you check the windows store, and you get plenty of dotnet apps, even the simple ones are heavy on disk, 100mb on average

And its a universal binary too, so probably half of that per architecture :)

Does this have a menubar widget? I miss MenuMeters, after it was killed by an OS update a while back. Would love to try it out, regardless!

MenuMeters works fine on my Mojave, but from reading release notes it would appear to run on BigSur as well. MenuMeters for OS X El Capitan 10.11 and later https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/ and https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters

Wow, didn't know there was a new version — thanks! I recently booted up my 2008 iMac to get some old files, and I was reminded how much I liked MenuMeters.

Confirmation here: it works fine on Big Sur too.

Pluto requires macOS 11 (Big Sur). It doesn't work on 10.15 (Catalina).

It works, but honestly it needs a visual update because it looks very err... hacker-ish?

I used the MenuMeters forks up until a few months ago when I purchased iStatMenus. Love it and well worth the money, especially since I can used the unified view (so my widgets don't get moved around arbitrarily by menu bar reorganization).

Give it a try, we think its a lot nicer than the tiny menu bar stats most apps provide -- they just don't display the right amount of information.

You can quickly collapse it away when you want it out of the way by clicking on the left mode "PLUTO" label.

Thanks! I mostly want to see CPU and wifi activity, so a menubar widget covers most of my bases. I also don't have a big multi-screen setup, so I have a stronger preference for menubar widgets than some people.

You can display only your CPU & Wi-Fi in Pluto. It becomes quite compact then. The CPU view can be compacted further, too.

I'm not certain I know what you mean, but have a look at https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

I've been extraordinarily happy with iStat Menus for showing a variety of system info in the menu bar.

https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

One thing I recently discovered is that macOS has no capacity to deal with overflow of the "menu bar widget" area.

I had rotated my 27" 5K displays to portrait mode, which I find better for coding. That made the menu bar narrower. The widgets in the menu bar on the left side just don't appear when the frontmost app's menu is too wide.

Since I use iStat Menus for this purpose, which puts (in my configuration) 6 different widgets there, and have several others as well, lots of icons were simply inaccessible.

That is one argument for Pluto's approach here.

Bartender app is great for that (and should have been sherlocked like 4 releases ago :))

Oh, great point! I forgot about that app, and indeed it would have saved the day.

(Ultimately, I decided I wanted at least one of my monitors landscape anyway... I realized this the first time I wanted to watch a video program, ha ha.)

The graphs on this look really close to how the ones in iStat Menus 6 look. I love the aesthetics of this app and how it shows all the graphs, but wonder if it has the ability to show things like temperatures and powers

The default theme is meant to match the OS style, similar to the graphs in Activity Monitor.

Temperature and power stats are not allowed to be read in App Store apps, but if we get enough requests we plan to write a little helper app that you can download separately to supply that info to Pluto.

iStat Menus works great on Big Sur - they keep it updated. Temp and Power included!

This looks nice, but I've personally found that this is something I prefer a TUI app for (specifically htop is very good). Why?

1. Because TUI apps are perfectly good for this. These kind of apps don't really need a fancy UI.

2. 90% of the time I want to use a system monitor is when my system is running slow and I need to find out why and which process I need to kill. A fancy GUI app will often take an age to load in these circumstances. Whereas somehow htop will usually still load in <1 secon d and be responsive.

Check bpytop

Well done. Looks absolutely worth the money!

Heads up: I'm unable to email pluto+support@cyaneous.com (the email listed for support.) I'm happy to follow up via email (heh) for troubleshooting.

Reminds me of customizing WindowMaker's dock with system monitor widgets[1]. I wonder how quickly (or if at all) the macOS dock responds to changes to an app's icon...

[1] https://www.dockapps.net/category/system

Same thing I was going to post! I always loved those little widgets, especially the one with the rubber ducky. They just have this whimsical feeling modern desktops are lacking

https://www.dockapps.net/wmbubble

I feel so old.

The original Mac OS X dock supported "live" icons. If you minimized the System Monitor, the icon turned into a real time CPU graph.

If you minimized a QuickTime video, the video continued playing, tiny, right in the dock.

I was really sad when this went away, and I don't really understand why it did.

> If you minimized the System Monitor, the icon turned into a real time CPU graph.

On macOS Mojave, the Activity Monitor still does show real-time graph in the icon if you want it to - right-clicking the icon gives you various graphs to choose from.

Don't know about the QT videos though.

Wow, I did not realize Activity Monitor did that. QuickTime Player seems to have lost its dynamic icon, though.

I've gotten to the point where I don't even use the dock anymore, it just stays hidden. Quite a long way from the good ole' days of themes.org, freshmeat.net, and spending hours customizing my desktop environment.

Is there a way on Mac to sum the memory usage of processes with the same name?

Not sure if it's just me but your App Store screenshots (great ones) look a bit low resolution. They look blurry on my mac's App Store app.

Thanks for the code! Appears to work great on my M1 Mac.

Enjoy :) Should support M1 perfectly.

Any chance for a portrait orientation?

Yes, we are exploring adding this.

Please do! It would fit my preferred window layout so much better.

Looks nice. I wish you luck.

I have sworn off these things, after numerous issues with another one.

What issues did you have?

I will try this when I get to my mac but such apps in the past have caused significant CPU load for me.

Should be very light weight and you can make it even more light weight by tweaking to only show what you require.

Crashes. HARD crashes. Random, frequent, mysterious. Worthless crash dumps.

Removing the utility immediately stopped them.

I tried the utility several times, over the last few years. Every time, as soon as I started using it, the crashes began.

I really wanted it to work, but it wasn't worth it.

not a jab at the author but at apple. i can't even see what this app looks like and now i don't even care anymore. i know, it asked me to leave Chrome. but i don't want to.

well, anyways, happy new year guys!

Awesome, clean UI

Thanks! Glad you are enjoying it.

It's so nice to see that clear data collection item in the Apple store.

No wonder surveillance capitalism and its boosters keep demanding someone "tear down the Apple monopoly".

I can't help but notice that this is being distributed via Apple.

Pretty soon you'll only be able to get Mac apps from the app store.

It's coming.

Mac App Store is nothing new, it was launched 10 years ago.

We’ve been hearing that refrain for years. It obviously can’t be disproven, but if you’d care to put a time bound on that statement, I’d be happy to find a site where we can place a bet against it.

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