HowOnline · Monitor your WiFi status 4+
Larry Gadea
-
- Free
Screenshots
Description
HowOnline is a simple app to display your current ping to google.com or detailed error info (such as not being able to ping 8.8.8.8, being on a self-assigned ip, broken dns, etc).
Features include:
- Monitors WiFi connection for detailed connection information and displays it in your OSX menu bar
- When online, live ping of google.com to ensure connectivity
- Status refreshes automatically on WiFi adapter state change or every 3 seconds
- Optimized for performance and minimal power usage (doesn't unnecessarily check everything every time)
- Support for both Dark and Light menu bars
- Auto-launches at startup if configured
- Totally free and opensource (please contribute! https://github.com/lg/HowOnline)
I would also love your feedback directly: trivex@gmail.com or file issues directly at https://github.com/lg/HowOnline/issues. The other project I work on is called Envoy, check it out: https://envoy.com.
Thanks!
What’s New
Version 1.01
- When the gateway router is unpingable, HowOnline will now also try connecting to it via HTTP/SSH/Telnet to test connectivity
- Added support for wifi interfaces which aren't on en0
- Added support for wired networks too
Ratings and Reviews
Very useful little app
Whenever things get hinky, I generally fire up a Terminal window and ping something I “know” is always there. So, this app does it all the time, in my menubar. Very nice. I do have a couple of suggestions that might make it a little better.
First, does google.com have to be hard-coded? It might be useful to allow an alternate site to be specified. In my case, I could use my lab's web site, then the app would be testing both my wifi and that of my lab. In that case, google.com could be a fall-back. This leads me to my second suggestion: use color, or some other font change. I find it somewhat difficult to read the letters. I still think that it's nice to write the ping time, but why not write it & the bar in a color on a continuum from red for ping fails to green for normal? And use black for wifi of/ ping returns some error other than time out, etc. This could even be hard-coded (say, green for < 10 ms, red for > 1s), or the user could specify different limits. Finally, one third suggestion: sometimes there are several identical ms values in a row, say 18ms. In that case, the display doesn't change. It might be worthwhile to have some kind of pulse indicator integrated into the bar, such as the follows: toggle the bar (not the numbers) on/off for each ping. When the ms value is good, make the bar just a little centered dot. As it gets worse, increase the size of the bar until it is all red (or black); in that case, it would be its present size. This would make in relatively more intrusive as the internet connection worsened.
UPDATE: after further use, I noticed a possible concern. The display was showing a run of very long ping times > 3 seconds, even some instances of “ping G” failure, which seemed odd to me because I had noticed no internet slowdowns. For comparison, I opened a Terminal window and pinged google.com myself. All times were < 20 ms. It could be that the app may not always measure ping times accurately (i.e., perhaps it doesn't see a response and then takes a while to get back in sync). Another possibility is that the app is using one of google.com's IP addresses without doing a new DNS lookup, so its results could be affected by Google's load balancing efforts. Anyway, it would be a good idea to look into this (note that my suggestion of an alternate IP address could be used work around this issue to some extent).
None of these are really necessary because the app is very useful as is, but I think they would improve it.
App Privacy
The developer, Larry Gadea, has not provided details about its privacy practices and handling of data to Apple.
No Details Provided
The developer will be required to provide privacy details when they submit their next app update.
Information
- Seller
- Larry Gadea
- Size
- 4 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
-
- Mac
- Requires macOS 10.11 or later.
- Languages
-
English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2016 Larry Gadea. All rights reserved.
- Price
- Free