Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military.
Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military.
Xirrus Wifi Monitor is available as a Yahoo Widget (for Mac, too) and a Vista Sidebar Gadget. It sits at the side of your screen scanning at your specified interval and updating its tiny radar screen with new hits. In our testing, it did a very good job at plotting the physical location of nearby APs. To our dismay the widget doesn’t actually animate sweeps - too bad, because that would be pretty sweet.
Don’t think it’s just eye-candy. Wifi Monitor also provides you a ton of statistcal data about your access point’s capabilities, your wireless connection, even a glossary of wireless terms. The details screen also allows you to disable your wireless adapter and to connect/disconnect (forwards you to your OS’s wireless connection manager).
Well worth the download - if not for functionality, at least for its good looks!