Temperature Monitor is an application to read out all available temperature sensors in Macintosh computers. The program can display and visualize the values measured by Mac OS X in a large variety of fashions. Among others, the following operations are supported:
- display in a default window
- output in a screen display in front or in the background of the screen
- tabular display in an overview window
- display in the menu-bar
- display in the Dock icon
- graphical display of short-term and long-term history curves in an unlimited number of windows
- speech output
- display of minimum and maximum values
- export to text or CSV files
Moreover, the application can display additional technical information about your computer. Among other information this includes processor type, processor and bus frequencies, and manufacturing information.
The application can read out the data only if your computer is equipped with the necessary sensors, and if Mac OS X can access them without needing third-party device drivers. Starting in summer 2002, Apple has begun to massively drive forward the use of monitoring probes in the PowerMac series, the Xserve series, and in portable computers. Some models are equipped with 38 and more sensors.
Temperature Monitor tries to detect all sensors on as many Macintosh computer types as possible. However, a prediction which sensors are available in which models is not possible, because Apple very often releases "silent product updates", where the hardware equipments of some models are changed but the names are not. The particular graphics card, hard disk configuration and operating system version is also important.
3.01 is a maintenance update which only affects a small minority of users.
If you are using release 3.0 with a Mac OS X system not among the problematic cases outlined below, it is neither necessary nor beneficial to download version 3.01.
- Added support for Mac OS X installations with incomplete or unusual configurations. In particular, this affects the following situations: Mac OS X systems where the computer name has been deleted, Macintosh computers with repaired or replaced mainboards where the hardware personalization fields in Open Firmware were empty, system installations that are very slow in waking up from sleep mode.
- Corrected a problem wheren the Connect button in the remote connection panel might have stayed in disabled mode when you manually entered data to connect to a remote computer in a different subnet.
Release 3.0:
- The application has now a multi-threaded architecture and its core was rewritten completely. The history curves are no longer interrupted when the application waits for a user response in a dialog window.
- Added new feature to display S.M.A.R.T.-compatibility and S.M.A.R.T. verification status of all disk drives.
- Added new feature to display the admissible limits for all sensor locations for which Apple's specifications are known. The limits are displayed in additional columns in the Sensor Overview window.
- Added new feature to locate and visualize extreme values in the history windows.
- Added support for S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors of several new hard disk models.
- Added preliminary support for Intel-based Macintosh systems.
- Added support to differentiate between multi-processor and multi-core/multi-thread systems.
- Added a user preference to keep the position of the screen display fixed, so users can no longer shift the display by mistake.
- Added user preferences to set customized speech output names for each sensor.
- Added feature to let the program open an application or document when a sensor alarm is triggered.
- Added feature to change the alignment for the display of readouts in the sensor window and screen display.
- Added user preference to change the background color of each history graph.
- Added feature to restore the time intervals selected in each of the history windows when the application is relaunched.
- Sensor types are now visualized using additional icons.
- The System Information window has been simplified.
- The preference window has been redesigned completely.
- The application now contains a workaround for a bug in nVidia graphics card drivers: If the drivers of GeForce 6800 cards mistakenly report that the cards' sensor identifications have changed, the application will no longer generate new preference settings for the "new" sensors of the supposedly "replaced" card.
- Corrected a problem with the labels of history rulers where minutes and seconds could be confused when a time interval of less than 1 hour was monitored with the ruler crosshair.
- Corrected a problem where not all non-refreshing sensors were detected on some specific PowerMac G5 models without liquid cooling system.
- Corrected a problem where a short-term history window was not updated when the sensor update interval was increased in the same user session.
- Corrected a problem where the Dock tile was not restored to show the application icon when the user launched the application via a permanent Dock entry and had defined a very short update interval.
- Corrected several hyper-links in the English version of the reference manual.
- Several new sections have been added to the reference manual.
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- Version: 4.6, 2/23/2009 11:50PM PST 
