Briefly,
One thing I’ve wanted Activity Monitor to have, ever since I installed MenuMeters, is an ability to sort bandwidth usage by application. I mean, being able to see when your network is used sometimes scares you. I leave my personal file sharing on most of the time when at home or at work to be able to share files between computers quickly. Also my iTunes sharing is on all the time. Then when somebody uses one of these services without me knowing, it can really feel odd. Suddenly your uploading at 3Mb/s or downloading at 300kb/s with out knowing which app is requisting this data or who is uploading something to my shared folder.
I’m not a programmer so I have no actual idea how this might work but i’d imagine there’s a way of knowing which ip certain data is coming from, right? Also should be quite easy to know which folder on the HD it’s being written on. So we know these two things. Now, this app that identifies these activities on your computer asks who owns the ip it’s coming from, result = rikard at 10.2.0.17. Ok, so it’s Rikard interacting with me. And the file is at /user/Public/Drop Box/lost2_20.mov. That sounds quite simple. This could also apply on someone playing your shared tunes. Data read from /thisAndThisMusicFolder/ is being sent over Ethernet to 10.2.0.5 or whatever.
Please could some one make a widget that does this. I would be ever so greatful.
Another widget someone could code is the one that says which TAB in Firefox/Safari is using how many CPU cycles. It’s so frustrating when, especially some like me with not that many cycles to spare, Firefox is hogging 70% of everything. Blaah. You can try this out by openning couple of tabs with images showing from istockphoto.com
Happy coding, let me know if you’re succesful,
admin