Battery Tool

A Tool to look at you PowerBook battery long term status

Freeware

You can check the status of your PowerBook battery by issuing the following command at the shell prompt:

ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity

The command produces an output such as:

    | | |   "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4018,"Amperage"=0,"Cycle Count"=168,"Current"=3950,"Voltage"=12485,"Flags"=1090519045,"AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4400})
    | |   |   |     "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4018,"Amperage"=0,"Cycle Count"=168,"Current"=3950,"Voltage"=12485,"Flags"=1090519045,"AbsoluteMaxCapacity"=4400})

Capacity and AbsoluteMaxCapacity give the current maximum capacity and the initial maximum capacity. Maximum capacity decreases with the recharge cycles (Cycle Count). Here is a very stupid (and incomplete) program developed with Xcode that allows you to see at these values in a window, in a perfect Mac OS X Cocoa style.

The program can be downloaded here (this works on PowerPC MACs) or here (this works on recent Intel MACs). The latter version only changes the way information is parsed from the new format output by ioreg that currently is:

[g4marcod:~] marcod% ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity
    | |           "CurrentCapacity" = 5359
    | |           "LegacyBatteryInfo" = {"Capacity"=5368,"Amperage"=0,"Cycle Count"=16,"Current"=5359,"Voltage"=12570,"Flags"=5}
    | |           "MaxCapacity" = 5368
    | |           "DesignCapacity" = 5020
[g4marcod:~] marcod%

Simply mount the image and drag the Battery tool application to your application folder.

This was an experiment to learn something about Mac Cocoa application developement. I made it just for fun. The application is released as is, withouth any implicit or esplicit guarantee.
The source code for the controller class is here