3D animated system utilization in the dock

Dec 17, '01 03:01:36PM

Contributed by: robg

I received an email this morning pointing me towards a little application called X3 from Jake's Software. X3 is an interesting demonstration of the dock's ability to display animated information. Rather than trying to come up with a description of what X3 does, here's the blurb from Jake's page:

X3 is an application that visualizes the system performance in the form of a realtime rotating 3D-object in the Dock. It is designed to use very little memory and processor cycles so you can keep it running all the time.
I recorded a very brief QuickTime movie of X3 in action so you can get an idea of how it works. In addition to the icon shown in the animation, there are about eight others to choose from, in either wireframe or solid models.

On my G4/350, X3 averages between 3% and 8% CPU usage, peaking at about 18%, according to 'top'. However, I can tell it's running during some operations (such as typing in this text box). Lowering the animation's frames per second from 20 to 10 greatly reduces this effect.

I doubt I'll run X3 all the time, as I usually keep my dock hidden and like to keep my CPU free for other stuff, but it is fun to watch the animation speed change as the system load varies. Definitely not the most mission-critical application of 2001, but well worth the two minutes it took to download and test.

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