By Jason Snell

February 23, 2015 8:43 PM PT

Autoping keeps an eye on my network

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Two weeks ago I was having some frustrating problems with my Internet connection. I ended up pulling up a Terminal window and keeping ping running in the corner of my screen so I could see if the connection was up, down, or just insanely delayed.

A couple of days into this frustration I had the realization that there’s probably an app that solves this problem with a little more elegance than my Terminal window, and of course there is, and it’s called autoping, and it’s free, and it does exactly what I want—put my network status in my menu bar and alert me when the connection drops.

This is hardly a mainstream need, but if you’re someone who is constantly checking to see if your connection to the Internet is up or down or incredibly slow, autoping does the job without getting in the way.

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