Battery Meter

Battery Meter is a small widget developed for the Yahoo! Widget Engine that caters to laptop users who want to keep an eye on their battery meter. It is easy to install and configure, even by people with little or no experience in such tools.

The interface of the app is based on a very small frame that looks like a cylinder. If the battery is full, the cylinder is filled with green bars on one end, and changes its hue from green to yellow, orange and red as it depletes. Plus, it shows the current percentage of the battery charge, along with the battery label.

By opening the right-click menu, you can bring up the Widget Preferences screen to make some adjustments to the meter. You can change the label and percentage font, hide the meter name, specify the meter refresh rate and size, as well as pick a different text and nib color.

With the help of the options offered by Yahoo! Widget Engine by default, you can also make the frame stay on top of other windows (which is useful when working in any other application, since it gives you a quick view of the laptop's battery level) or always below, to ignore mouse events and to prevent dragging.

We have noticed a minimal CPU and system memory consumption during Battery Meter's runtime, so it's safe to say the tool does not burden the computer's activity. It has a good response time and shows accurate information concerning the battery charge and depletion levels. No error dialogs have been displayed in our tests and the widget did not hang or crash. Battery Meter delivers a simple solution to monitoring the current level of your battery lifespan.