iStat Pro

Having the information you need right in front of you can make things much easier, regardless of what you are working on. iStat Pro was created for this purpose. It adds a new widget to your Mac's Dashboard, which enables you to monitor nearly any aspect of your machine. Everything, from running applications to CPU or memory usage, can be found on one compact panel.

All you have to do is download, unpack and run iStat Pro, which can be done in under a minute. Once you run the executable, the Dashboard will show up immediately, with the new widget. By default, it displays the CPU and memory usage, as well as disk space usage and network traffic statistics, on separate tiles, which can be swapped by clicking and dragging.

iStat Pro comes with a tabbed configurations panel, on which you can enable additional information tiles and make a few tweaks, like switching to different measuring units, replacing bars with graphs, set a S.M.A.R.T. update interval and so on. You can also decide to leave the widget in its default horizontal orientation or switch it to a vertical orientation.