README

This is an unofficial fork of MenuMeters intended to add some features that
hopefully will be integrated into the main MenuMeters distribution, at which
time this fork will be terminated.

The features added are all CPU meters features:

1. The user can choose to display CPU thermometers horizontally instead of
   vertically.  This results in thinner, but longer, thermometers, which
   allows for greater detail.  The CPU meters menu region is much more
   efficiently used, with almost no extra decoration outside of the
   thermometer bars themselves, and a minimum of whitespace.  I wanted to
   use every available bit of space to get as much useful information as
   I could.  Horizontal bars allow this in ways that vertical bars
   cannot.

2. The user can choose to 'sort CPUs by usage', which shows the highest
   CPU usage percent of any core sorted first, then the second highest next,
   etc.  The idea here is that when a process or set of processes is
   running, the scheduler may move it around between CPUs, and without
   sorting the CPUs by usage, the result is thermometers whose values sort
   of jump around and are harder to get a read on.  With sorted thermometers,
   a single process running at 100% CPU always shows up as the top bar
   (unless the CPU timeslices the processor between more than once CPU,
   which it occasionally does).  This makes the display much easier to read
   and the overall load much easier to track.

3. If the display mode is thermometers (vertical or horizontal), and CPU
   sorting by usage is in effect, then the user can furthermore choose to
   average the least utilized processors into a single thermometer.  This
   is very similar to the already-existing option to average all CPUs into
   a single thermometer, but this new option only averages the least
   utilized half of the processors into a single thermometer, leaving the
   most utilized half of the CPUs as individual bars.  The idea here is
   that a hyperthreading-aware operating system (like Mac OS X) will always
   prefer to schedule threads across cores, only scheduling two threads on
   the same hyperthreading core via the two separate logical processors, if
   all other physical cores are already busy.  The lowest utilized cores
   should, under the vast majority of circumstances, represent the additional
   logical cores associated with physical cores already in use by the
   operating system.  A user may prefer to see all of those averaged into
   a single bar since they don't represent the same degree of thread
   execution as that of the 'real' physical cores.  This further de-clutters
   the CPU usage display.  On my 4-core, 8-thread CPU, this option allows
   me to see 5 bars instead of 8, with the corresponding increase in the
   fidelity of the display of those bars due to the increased amount of room
   that I then have to display them.

Additionally, I have added a makefile to allow the project to be built by
GNU make in addition to Xcode (I find working this way easier).

This can be accomplished by a command like this:

gmake -j9

The resulting installer will be in build/dmgvolroot.

Additionally, a complete DMG file containing the installer can be built
by:

gmake dmg

The result will be in build/MenuMeters.dmg.