ThermoInDock for Mac

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on March 18, 2013

For laptop users, or for any user performing machine-intensive tasks, it might be reassuring to access temperature data directly from the machine sensors to see how the computer handles temperature increases and stays cool under any workload. With this idea in mind, ThermoInDock for Mac attempts to help you, but doesn't really succeed.

The app mainly consists of a dynamic dock icon that can show you real-time temperature information regarding your machine. We found the default transition rather eye-catching and a little disturbing. It is nice to have this information at hand, but you certainly don't want it to draw your eye every time it moves its display from one sensor to another. Furthermore, you cannot choose which data to display, which is rather disappointing. The program simply cycles trough all available temp sensors that it can find on your machine. If you are only interested in two sensors, say GPU and CPU, then you are out of luck with ThermoInDock for Mac. Having to wait to see what you want is pointless for an app designed to have information readily available. Also, the sensor names are not resolved, and their technical names are far from self-explanatory. To add to an already crowded list of required improvements, we also encountered a blank and unresponsive icon after a few hours of use, which rendered the software useless until we got it fixed.

The idea of having temperature information constantly on your dock is interesting, but poor implementation and bugs make ThermoInDock for Mac more irritating than useful to use. Alternatives do exist and provide a better solution than this software does at the moment.