Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Tethered Mac? Your wallet will love this data monitoring app

Individual software products have limited awareness of the network connected to when you’re on a Mac. The iOS operating system and iOS apps typically are more careful about letting you pick and choose what’s sent over cellular and what’s not. In OS X, Dropbox has a Pause button, and CrashPlan, my backup software, lets you block Wi-Fi networks by name. But OS X more or less assumes it can always let apps use 100 percent of available throughput. Photos for OS X are a great and terrible example of that.

TripMode turns on automatically for every new network or new Personal Hotspot mode (such as a USB connection), but you can override the setting, and it remembers that override. For instance, connect via USB to your iPhone or iPad to use its Personal Hotspot, and TripMode activates. If you click its switch from On to Off, however, the next time you connect via USB, TripMode will remain off. It retains this information for every network you connect, restoring whatever state you left it in when you last connected.

TripMode keeps track of data transferred while it’s active, though not by network, just cumulatively. Still, you’ll likely use it mostly to restrict excess usage on a mobile network, and thus its total remains useful. You can view data in the last session, the current day, or the current month.

The software could do more. Allowing blocklisting rather than allowing listing and creating groups and sets for different circumstances or easier organization. I might want a “polite Wi-Fi network user” set when I’m at a local coffee shop, “mobile throttled” for typical Personal Hotspot use, and “Starbucks Trenta usage” for those mega-coffee outlets equipped with gigabit Internet. Though technically more difficult, throwing apps could also be useful, allowing only a certain throughput or maximum data usage, which can be useful on a home broadband connection with caps or overages.

apple mac

These are quibbles and room for improvement in future upgrades or as paid in-app additions. What it does is nice at a price. On many American cellular plans, overage fees start at $15 per gigabyte or three times the sale price of TripMode. TripMode can be used for seven days with its full functionality; after that, it throttles to allow only 15 minutes of use per day if a license isn’t purchased.

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William M. Alberts
William M. Alberts
Unable to type with boxing gloves on. Professional beer scholar. Problem solver. Extreme pop culture fan. Fixie owner, shiba-inu lover, band member, International Swiss style practitioner and holistic designer. Acting at the intersection of design and mathematics to save the world from bad design. I'm a designer and this is my work.

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