Comments on: Home Zone Beta 4

By: Juan Cabanela

Juan Cabanela — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:40:07 +0000

I second this, I see greyed out text in the menu.

By: pal05

pal05 — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:08:50 +0000

The most important feature for me would be the ability to act on ethernet ips or the mac adress of the gateway!
The most time i have wlan aviable but i don’t use it cause i have a ethernet connection wich is a lot faster…

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:48:56 +0000

Love the progress you’ve made on this! It’s just a UI change, but if you allowed “None of the following” as an trigger option (e.g. for locking when none of your Airport networks are available), it might be less confusing for users. As things stand, you have to understand that when you “leave” a network, it means that none of those are available.

Also, while at work and plugged into ethernet, I disable my Airport. However, this automatically switches my location back to Automatic. Can I make it distinguish between when my Airport is off and when it’s simply not connected to my work networks?

By: Jonas Witt

Jonas Witt — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:09:50 +0000

Support for starting the screen saver immediately or running shell scripts or AppleScripts will be added soon, and I’m currently working on more flexible Airport scanning (which will include an option to only recognise a network when you’re connected to it). We’re still in beta, so if you can think of other useful actions to include, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

By: Cory

Cory — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:32:49 +0000

This is a really good idea for a program, but you should put in more options for when the device leaves or returns (run script, turn on screensaver, etc.)…just a thought

By: Vasilis

Vasilis — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 21:10:36 +0000

I actually thought that Home Zone triggered actions when my computer connects to a certain network. That seems to make more sense to me, but I might miss something.
If I am connected to my neighbors open network I might want all my keychains locked. But Home Zone won’t lock them because my own network is around. That is a little strange, isn’t it?

But for the rest, it’s an excellent app. Right what I need as a freelancer.

By: generalmole

generalmole — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:59:17 +0000

Feature Request… So far I love where this cool new app is going. One request though, would be to have it activate the screensaver when Bluetooth device leaves range, so you don’t have to wait for the screensaver to come or manually activate.
Thanks, keep up the good work.

By: Jonas Witt

Jonas Witt — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:34:53 +0000

Currently not, but I’ll try to switch this to a preference pane anyway so the status bar item won’t be the main interface. Not sure how long this will take, though.

By: Jonas Witt

Jonas Witt — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:32:42 +0000

Home Zone scans for available airport networks every 16 seconds (which corresponds to your approx. every 15th packet delay). What it does is the same as running
$ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -s
or opening the wireless status bar item (which also takes a short moment, usually).

This seems to disrupt wireless traffic and is not desirable, that’s right. I’ll see what I can do… Running the above command with -S doesn’t interrupt traffic, but doesn’t give exact results as it also shows older networks, and only checking the network that you’re connected to isn’t very great, either. Maybe Home Zone can perform different types of scans with different intensities in a sensible manner.

By: Stefan Pfetzing

Stefan Pfetzing — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:16:42 +0000

Hi, I dunno whats wrong, but on my Core2Duo MacBook Pro HomeZone tends to kinda block my wireless lan.

When I ping my router, approx every 15th packet I get packet loss and ping times somewhere around 2000ms.

When quitting HomeZone, everything is fine.