Minipulse and the Deskbar

Although few readers will have BeOS Release 4 quite yet, it will be coming to you very soon now. So in anticipation, and for those of you lucky enough to already be running R4, here's a Tip that only works with BeOS Release 4.

We've been adding small features and refinements to most of the applications that ship with the BeOS. One of the apps that everyone uses at some point is Pulse, the performance meter utility, which shows how much work your computer's CPU(s) is doing.

Pulse has some cool new features in R4. If you launch Pulse from the command line with the "--help" argument, you'll get a full listing of what's available. Just type Pulse --help in Terminal.

In my mind, the coolest new feature is that Pulse's display can be a Replicant, and can reside in the Deskbar. This lets you have a performance meter which is small enough to be unobtrusive, but always on screen for you to see. Here's a look at my Deskbar when running Chart, a demo application included with BeOS Release 4 (note that I also have the Japanese input method installed, the other Deskbar icon you might not recognize):

You can create this display very simply, by typing Pulse --mini --deskbar --width 9 & in Terminal. More interesting is to add that same line to your /home/config/boot/UserBootscript file, so that the mini Pulse is started up when you boot the BeOS, automatically. Here's what your UserBootscript file would look like when you add this:

Hopefully this will whet your appetite for BeOS Release 4, which you should be able to play with quite a bit over your holiday vacation. I'll provide a few more Tips for R4, just to keep you entertained the whole break. ;-)