I’ve been using iconping for years, and it rocks. Sadly it doesn’t cater to all my needs, and I was eager to contribute back.

After seeing there are some pull requests and issues waiting for years, I decided to fork and incorporate all pull requests including my own.

The app icon changed, so Pull Request #6 is merged and Issue #7 resolved. I also merged Pull Request #1, so Issue #3 is also resolved.

Of course, I’m more than willing to accept more issues and pull requests, so be welcomed to push some code!

The icon is meant to be a domino, between 1-9 representing the ping time. That tells you at a quick glance whether ping times are ~<100ms or ~300ms or ~700ms or something greater (in which case it shows an exclamation mark).

Many times I end using a computer in places with a poor or erratic Wi-Fi connection, so while I’m surfing the web, checking my email, or writing a message on Twitter/X, if something does not work as expected I’m not sure if the problem is my internet connection or a specific website.

My reaction when this happens is to open the Terminal application in OSX and check with a ping 8.8.8.8 command if everything is working well at least at the basic level, that is, I’m able to reach internet at all?

For all this reasons I spent a few hours creating this small OSX menubar application that continuously pings the 8.8.8.8 address checking if the connection is working, and changing the menubar icon accordingly.

The world icon will change color accordingly to the state of the connection:

• Green if we receive pong packets back from 8.8.8.8. Connection OK.
• Yellow if we receive pong packets, but with a delay that is greater than 300 milliseconds. Connection Slow.
• Red if we don’t receive pong packets for three seconds or more. Connection not working.

The application almost has no user interface at all, if not for a tiny menu used to quit the application or to set it to automatically restart at the next reboot.

Source Code

Icon Ping is open source software (BSD license), the source code is available on GitHub. Since I’ll likely not have much time to hack on iconping the only way the project can survive is thanks to your pull requests.

History

• 1.0 – first release.
• 1.01 – fix for crash at startup in some systems. Support for old osx versions (10.5, 10.6, 10.7 are now supported).
• 1.02 – ping 8.8.8.8 instead of 4.2.2.2 since the latter apparently no longer works, at least from Italy (7 seconds RTT for one week).