Steff.me

There’s always been two things that have bothered me about the menu bar item for the Airport on a Mac. The first is that you don’t know what the signal strength is for a network unless you’re connected to it. The second is that it doesn’t show whether a network is password protected or locked. When out and looking for an open WiFi connection it can be quite irritating to click on a network just to be prompted by a password dialog box.

I know there are plenty of applications out there which you can download and have as a separate WiFi network locator but it’s simpler to use the Airport menu item. WiFind from TastyApps solves both of these problems and works so well.

WiFind is a tiny add-on to the original Airport menu item (no extra useless app or menu item, woo!) which shows the extra information of signal strength and whether the network is locked or unlocked. This is the perfect little app for being out-and-about looking for an open connection that’s reliable to connect to. Of course, if you look at the picture above you’ll notice that the only unlocked ones have factory setting names, so they would have been the obvious choice to go for anyway. Still, this is a very useful app to find the signal strength and open networks from nice people and places.

This app costs $8.