Posted By Quentin Carnicelli on July 14th, 2004

Seeing Brent’s post about buying more RAM to run Xcode smoothly finally inspired me to wrap up the polish on a little memory monitor I wrote for myself.

It’s called MemoryCell, and all it does is sit in your menu bar displaying the current amount of memory the foreground application is using. This is different from other memory monitors, which just display the total amount of memory used.

I wrote it for the exact same reason Brent bought more RAM: Over time ProjectBuilder and Xcode suck more and more memory, and slow down further and further. The trick is just to know when this is happening, and relaunch them. But it also functions nicely for other applications that leak a lot, like web browsers. Or as a developer tool, for easily monitoring the memory usage of your own application.

You can download it here, comes complete with source code. (Note to news sites: this is not an offical release, so please don’t list it just yet)

And while we are on the topic of developer tools, I also finally got around to updating my old Cocoa wrapper for Carbon Hot Keys. I neglected it for awhile, but people still seem to be using it. You can grab the new version here. It now works with non-QWERTY keyboard layouts, and includes a sample application so you can see how to use it.

Enjoy, and if you’re using these tools, it’s always nice to link others to this post or let us know.