This App Will Notify You As Soon As Your Mac Loses Internet Access
Anyone who regularly uses public Wi-Fi at an airport, hotel or cafe knows that connecting to a network and accessing the Internet are not the same thing. Unfortunately, your Mac isn’t good at telling you whether you’re online or not, which can lead to frustrating troubleshooting.
The free Online Check app solves this problem. It’s an icon in the menu bar that turns red when you’re offline. You can also ask it to send you notifications when your online status changes. It’s a simple program, but it’s a life saver if you’re somewhere with an unstable connection. You can install Online Check from the Mac App Store or from the developer’s website .
How online verification works
I used to work in IT, which meant I spent a lot of time troubleshooting network connection problems. Typically the fastest way to check if your Internet connection is working on a Mac is to open a terminal and type “ping apple.com”, which will attempt to connect to Apple.com ; this will let you know if your internet connection is actually working. Online Check is simply a menu bar app that does this for you on a regular basis.
The Online Test menu bar icon gives you quick access to your Mac’s Wi-Fi settings, which is useful when troubleshooting, and you can click a button to view a log of when your computer connected and disconnected from the Internet.
There isn’t much to offer in the settings. You can decide whether the app will launch when you log in, and choose to only show the menu bar icon when your computer is offline (handy if you’re trying to free up space on the menu bar) . Essentially, you can install an app and not think about it until you need it, and that’s how most tools are supposed to work.