Raging Menace announced late on Monday the release of MenuMeters 1.4b1, a beta release of the stat monitoring utility that includes Snow Leopard support. This is the first update of MenuMeters since January of 2006, and it includes a number of other changes and bug fixes, as well.

Changes in version 1.4b1:

• [FEATURE] Snow Leopard compatible Universal Binary (ppc, i386, x86_64).
• [FEATURE] Includes MenuCracker 2.x for Snow Leopard and for better long-term compatibility with other menubar add-ons.
• [FEATURE] Hide more inactive statistics on inactive network interfaces.
• [FEATURE] Simplified Intel CPU naming ("Intel" not 80486).
• [FEATURE] Support for IPv6 addresses in the network menu, based on patches from Smith Kennedy.
• [CHANGE] Major code cleanup, fixing a number of obscure bugs and probably introducing some more.
• [CHANGE] Changes to various menubar displays and text for readability and general cleanup. Removed various tweaky options (like disabling antialiasing) that haven't been relevant since very early OS X and aren't worth the maintenance cost.
• [CHANGE] Remove CPU menu option for 'nice' color, hasn't worked since Apple API changed.
• [CHANGE] Removed CPU menu thermal register statistic, hasn't worked since G3.
• [CHANGE] Reordered memory pie chart to place wired at the start of the graph.
• [BUG] Fixed NSNumberFormatter overflow for memory statistics.
• [BUG] Fix preference reset when opening preference pane on Leopard and later.
• [BUG] Fix support for the PowerMate regardless of driver version.
• [BUG] Fix Connect and Disconnect commands for VPN and other complex interfaces controlled by the PPP subsystem.
• [BUG] Show disk space for mounted NTFS volumes.
• [BUG] Fix slow disk unmount/eject on Tiger.
• [BUG] CPU percent user/system split display includes nice'd process. This matches current implementations of 'top'.
• [LOCALE] Simplified Chinese localization, thanks to Tintin.

MenuMeters is one of several popular Mac OS X utilities that need significant overhauls to work with Snow Leopard, and the geeks here at TMO have been eagerly awaiting such updates.

This is a beta release, however so treat it accordingly. Raging Menace noted, "This is a beta version. While preliminary testing has shown no major issues, this is a prerelease and serious bugs may be present."

MenuMeters is free.