→ Home Zone beta 5 (Mac OS X 10.4 only)

Please delete the file PersistentStore.xml at ~/Library/Application Support/Home Zone/ in your home directory.

Beta 5 changes the way that Home Zone scans for available Airport networks. First, you can set a custom scan interval in the new preferences dialog. The Airport scan interval is pretty short (5 seconds by default), but Home Zone performs a full broadcast (which leads to the short performance hits Stefan reported) only every tenth scan (and immediately after launch and waking up, so you’re up to date). Also, you can now specify that a trigger should only recognise an Airport network when you’re actually connected to that network, and you can enter one or more base station IDs (BSSIDs) so the trigger will only recognize the network when your base station has one of these BSSIDs. If you only have triggers that recognise connected Airport networks, Home Zone will skip the full broadcast scan altogether (except after launch and wake), so if you encounter wireless performance problems, switch all your triggers to “connected” only.

Also new in this release:

• You can force-enable or -disable zones via the status bar menu of each zone. By default, Home Zone will reset your override when the zone changes its state, but you can disable that in the preferences
• New action: Immediately start the screen saver
• The open file/URL action has been improved to support AppleScript files (.scpt) and executable files; if you want to run a shell script there, make sure it’s executable
• You can specify that a zone should be considered active if none of its triggers are active. This seems illogical, but it’s nice when you want to define an inverse zone, like “Not at home”.
• New icon and website

Transforming this into a Preferences Pane will be tricky for several reasons, though. The interface (which is really cluttered right now, I hope to change that at least a bit) is just too big. Maybe I just leave it like it is.

I’ll look into supporting more triggers next, like the reachability of a certain computer/router/IP and maybe make the actions interface easier to handle (sorting actions would be useful, too).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Home Zone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.