Instructions

Install

Drop MiniBatteryStatus in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Usage

MiniBatteryStatus is already configured to start monitoring your laptop’s primary battery. When the laptop is plugged, the widget will assume a deep blue color; moreover a small status icon tells you wheter the battery is just bypassed or it is charging. When you’re running unplugged, the widget switches to color mode and changes from deep green (100% of charge) to deep red (0% of charge). Of course, in between you’ll see literally thousands of different gorgeous gradations.

MiniBatteryStatus features four different visualizations. The default visualization is the remaining charge percentage.

Click on the front of the widget to change the visualization to the remaining time. You may need to wait some time to allow the widget to calculate the time.

Click again to change the visualization to battery details. Here you can read the current and maximum capacity and the completed cycles.

Click one last time to set the plain visualization. You will just see the translucent charge bar. Click again to start the cycle.

Settings

You can change the settings by flipping the widget to show its back preference pane. On the back is also provided a button to give you quick access to the Energy Saver system preference pane.

General settings

• Battery to monitor

  Some computers (like old Pismo’s) have more than a battery. MiniBatteryStatus lets you choose which battery to monitor. You can launch as many widgets as your computer batteries.

  For your convenience, there’s also a “Demo” mode to better illustrate the behavior of the widget.

• Check for updates

  Allow the widget to automatically check if there is an available update (requires an internet connection).

Growl settings

• Enable Growl notifications

  Enables the communication between the widget and Growl event notification system. You may need to download and install Growl (http://www.growl.info) to use this feature.

• Notify battery full

  Enables an alert when your battery has been charged. Useful when you need to know when charge is over and you’re busy doing something else.

• Notify low battery

  Whoops! This is really important. A customizable low battery threshold lets you decide when to be alerted when your battery is slowly dying.

• Notify power source changes

  Check this to be informed when your laptop switches from AC Power to Battery Power and vice versa.

Sharing settings

• Share battery data

  Start or stop the battery sharing daemon; it will make your battery data monitorable by MiniBatteryLogger.

  Additionally, your battery data will be sent to the Battery Data Archive, a database that collects precious data to elaborate statistics, calculate average battery life etc.