14 DAY TRIAL // There are hundreds, if not thousands of little programs and widgets and little menu bar items out there on the net that offer all sort of enhanced functionality to the OS X programs we all use everyday. While each of them does things a little different or offers some option that the others do not or simply does it different, that is still a lot of little programs. But there is one that takes the proverbial cake by doing... everything. Did I say everything? Well, perhaps not everything, it won't fix you a nice cup of tea, but it will do almost everything that all those little programs do. Here is a break down as I can see no other way of approaching the enormity of this program.
Where will all this take place There are several locations where you can place the You Control menu items. The first location is in the upper left corner of the screen. I know what you're thinking, no, it will not interfere with the Apple menu, and because you have to click it for the menu to expand, there is no way of accidentally triggering it. The second location is in the menu bar, to the right of whatever other menu items you might have active. The third location is underneath your mouse. The program will let you define shortcut menus that appeal like a contextual menu, underneath the mouse whenever you press a keyboard shortcut you define. The power this gives you is amazing.
Now that we've seen where it can do it, let's see what it can do.
Address Book The Address Book module lists all your contacts in several ways either by favorites, recent, groups, name and company. Each category has its own submenus such as letters for name and companies for company. From these submenus you can select a contact and another submenu will appear for that contact listing all their information. Each piece of information can be copied or, for some of them, you can choose additional actions such as sending e-mails which will automatically open up Mail and create a new message addressed to that person, or Map Address and Copy Mailing Label in the case of street addresses.
Calendar As you might expect, this module is linked to iCal and will list the day's To Dos and Events. You can also see the To Dos and Events for the upcoming week as well as a Calendar explorer in which you can explore ten years worth of Events and To Dos broken down by Month and day.
Clock The clock module will display the current time and date, as well as a visual calendar of the next three months and the upcoming year.
CPU Monitor This module will display the current load of the CPU in a visual manner, the menu offering additional information such as the breakdown of the CPU load between user, system, nice and idle. Also here you can see the top ten resource hogs with their respective percentage of CPU and memory usage.
Disk Monitor This module will give us a visual indicator of whether information is being written or read from the disc. The submenu will show a list of mounted drives as well as the capacity of the drive, the amount of space used and the amount of space available, the format, mount path and device path.
File System This module will give you a menubar which can display the content of any folder on your hard drive. You can have many instances of this module in order to track multiple folders. Not only will this show the contents of the folder and let you browse through them, but you can also see previews of certain files, as well as detailed information such as file size, creation date, modification date, file type and file creator. You can also perform several actions right from this menu such as opening the file, copying it, deleting it as well and moving it. It can even show the contents of packages, hidden files and place a 'parent folder' item at the top of any folder submenu from which you can move up in the file hierarchy, even if the folder is at the base of the current submenu.
iTunes Besides giving you play/pause, previous and next track buttons in the menu, this module can show you the current playing track, an artist listing, an album listing as well as a genre listing. As if that wasn't enough, you also have recent artists, recent albums, and recent songs as well as playlists and advanced controls. As you might expect, genres will open a submenu with artists in that genre, artists will open a submenu with all the albums of that artist and albums will show a submenu for all the tracks in that album. For each track you can see the title, artist, album, duration, track umber, genre and year.
Mail This module will display any unread mail you might have, and you can even use the mail commands such as marking it as flagged, read or junk and moving it to the trash.
Memory Monitor This module will give a visual representation of the memory usage as well as detailed information about free, used and total memory, plus a breakdown of memory in pages that are either wired, active, inactive and free.
Network Monitor This module will give a visual representation of the network transfer activity as well as detailed information such as the device name, link speed, hardware type, MAC address, IP address, Subnet Mask, Router Address, DNS Server addresses. Also included is the throughput of each active network interface.
News Reader This module lets you subscribe and view RSS feeds directly from the menubar. Each feed will have a submenu with articles and you can read each article right from the menu. Clicking on any article will take you to the web address with the detailed story. If you wish you can even have the latest news from the feeds you choose to scroll through the menubar.
Pasteboard This module will keep track of all you recent copied clippings. You can preview them from the submenu, and you can move any of them to the active clipboard. You can choose whether you want these clippings to persist across logins and restarts as well as ignore clippings larger than a set amount you define.
Processes This module will give a list of the currently active processes. You can view applications, user processes, system processes and other user processes (which contain user related tasks that you do not normally interact with such as the Window Server). For each application you can see the currently open windows and switch to any of them, view the process information such as the process id, user id and user name, as well as quit, force quit and reveal any application in the Finder.
Recents This module is a copycat of the Recent Items in the Apple menu, except that it can be placed anywhere within You Control. You can choose whether you want to display applications or documents or both.
Stocks This module will display, you guessed it, stock information. Just enter the stock symbol of the company you want to track and you have instant access to a huge amount of information, and you can choose to see everything or only a few bits of stock information.
System Prefs That's right, this module will give you a list of the preference panes you have currently installed. You can view them by name or you can have them broken down into categories like they are in the System Preferences window.
User Switching This module will let you change users, you can choose to display the login picture, whether a user has logged in or not or jump directly to the Login Window.
Weather This module gives you very detailed weather information for the upcoming week. A huge amount of information is available, from the minimum and maximum temperatures, to the time of the sunset and sunrise, wind speed and direction and humidity. The information comes from the weather channel so it will be like sitting on the computer and in front of the TV at the same time.
Divider This module places a divider complete with a name in it. While at first glance this might seem absurd, when you consider what complex, intricate menu and submenu systems you can create with this program it is nothing less than necessary.
The Good This program offers unprecedented control and tweaking of a veritable army of contained widgets and enhancers. The fact that you can have tens of menus that only appear when invoked by keyboard commands makes it ideal for the power user who wants everything without it showing or getting in the way.
The Bad I can't really say there is anything wrong with this program. The overwhelming number of options and features it has is its strongest point. And if you don't need them and find them excessive, this program is not for you.
The Truth The one stop widget and application enhancer solution. The only thing that is not in there is the kitchen sink, or maybe it is but I just didn't look deep enough. At any rate, if you fancy yourself a power user, download this, install it and revel in the power it gives you.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
