by Whenever the fans in my MacBook Pro suddenly rev up, I use the built-in Activity Monitor app (Applications > Utilities) to see what’s going on. But I’ve often wished for a quicker and easier way to check my Mac’s activity than having to open Activity Monitor.
The free System Lens (Mac App Store link) offers a compromise: It resides in the menu bar, and when you click its icon, you see a snapshot of which apps are actively using your computer’s resources.
System Lens provides one-click access to a list of apps using processor resources.
System Lens doesn’t offer all the features or the flexibility of Activity Monitor. For example, while Activity Monitor provides hard numbers about how much processing power an app is using (such as CPU percentage or the number of threads), System Lens uses simple labels: Low, Medium, and High. For people who want the details, System Lens won’t replace Activity Monitor completely.
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