PingDot

A dot in your Mac's menu bar that tells you whether the internet works.
schub.tech/labs/pingdot

PingDot answers one question: is the app frozen, or is it my internet? One glance at the top right instead of a terminal window running ping all day.

• Green: the last 10 pings came back.
• Yellow: packets are getting lost, or pings get through but websites won't load (DNS or HTTPS failing).
• Red: 3 pings in a row lost, or no network at all.

PingDot pings 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) and 8.8.8.8 (Google) in parallel and only turns red when both stop answering. If one provider has a bad day, the dot stays green and the menu says "8.8.8.8 unreachable — but you are online".

Install

Mac App Store: coming soon.

Homebrew:

brew install schub-tech/tap/pingdot

Download: get PingDot-<version>.zip from the latest release, unzip it and move PingDot to Applications. The app is notarized by Apple.

Then turn on Settings → Launch at login. PingDot runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 13 Ventura or later.

When it helps

• Video calls. Zoom freezes and you want to know whether it's Zoom or your connection before you start apologising.
• Train, hotel and café Wi‑Fi. Connected, but nothing loads? PingDot shows whether the uplink is dead or a login page is waiting for you.
• Phone hotspot. See when the connection drops in a tunnel, and when it's back.
• Home office. The menu checks your router, DNS and a real HTTPS connection separately, so you know whether to restart the router or call your provider. Copy diagnostics gives you a text report for the support chat.
• Ping works, websites don't. When DNS fails while pings still get through, the dot turns yellow. A plain ping never catches this.
• Office networks that block ping. PingDot notices that the web works anyway, shows yellow instead of a false red and suggests switching to TCP connect.
• Your own hosts. Add your NAS, fritz.box, a VPN gateway or the company proxy as an extra target.

What the menu shows

Click the dot for the details:

Each target gets a row with its last 16 pings and the average, minimum, maximum and loss. Below, the diagnostics check the network interface, your router, DNS and an HTTPS connection to www.apple.com. When something is wrong, the line under the headline names the likely cause, for example "Router reachable, internet not — provider outage or Wi‑Fi login page?" or "Wi‑Fi is off or the cable is unplugged".

Settings

Everything lives in the menu under Settings:

Targets	1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 (default), 9.9.9.9, plus your own via Add target…, e.g. fritz.box or a company proxy. At least one stays on.
Check every	500 ms, 1 s (default), 2 s or 5 s
Method	ICMP ping (default) or TCP connect
Show latency in menu bar	Round-trip time in ms next to the dot
Use symbols instead of colours	✓, ! and ✕ instead of colours, for colour-blind users
Launch at login	Start automatically
Check for updates	Once a day, asks GitHub for a newer release and shows a line in the menu (GitHub and Homebrew version only)

Why it reacts fast

1. One long-lived ICMP socket per target. No /sbin/ping process every second, no output parsing. A ping costs one sendto, and the reply arrives on a dispatch read source. No root needed: PingDot uses unprivileged ICMP datagram sockets (SOCK_DGRAM/IPPROTO_ICMP), like Apple's SimplePing.
2. Link state is instant. NWPathMonitor reports a dropped Wi‑Fi or a pulled cable the moment it happens, so the dot turns red without waiting for timeouts.
3. Diagnostics confirm before they warn. Router, DNS and HTTPS are checked every 10 s and right after every network change. A failed DNS or HTTPS check only counts once a second check 3 s later fails too, so rejoining a Wi‑Fi doesn't flash yellow.

Idle cost: about 0.2 % CPU and 38 MB memory.

Privacy

No tracking, no analytics, no account. PingDot talks to the targets you configure (1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 by default), your router, and www.apple.com for the DNS and HTTPS checks. The GitHub and Homebrew version also asks GitHub once a day whether there is a newer release; you can turn that off. Settings stay on your Mac. Details in the privacy policy.

Build from source

You need macOS 13 or later and the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install). Releases are built with Scripts/release.sh, see docs/RUNBOOK.md.

./Scripts/build-app.sh
open build/PingDot.app

Copy the app to /Applications before turning on Launch at login; login items only work reliably from there.

To test without the menu bar:

swift build -c release
./.build/release/PingDot --selftest                     # the configured targets
./.build/release/PingDot --selftest 1.1.1.1 fritz.box   # any targets

The self-test measures ICMP and TCP against every target and shows what gets through on the current network. If ICMP shows "no replies" and TCP "works", switch to Settings → Method → TCP connect.

Code layout

File
ICMPPinger.swift	ICMP echo over an unprivileged datagram socket
TCPProbe.swift	Fallback: times a TCP handshake
NetworkMonitor.swift	History, traffic-light logic, link state
Diagnostics.swift	Router, DNS and HTTPS checks
StatusItemController.swift	Menu bar item and menu
StatusIcon.swift	Draws the dot and the sparkline
UpdateChecker.swift	Daily release check (not in the App Store build)
SelfTest.swift	--selftest
Scripts/build-app.sh	Builds build/PingDot.app
Scripts/package-zip.sh	Also builds build/PingDot.zip for sharing
Scripts/release.sh	Signed releases for GitHub, Homebrew and the App Store

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first. Changes are listed in the changelog.

Made by Schub

Schub is Munich's most selective accelerator. Build with founders who've done it. Sometimes we build and publish experiments like this one. Find more at schub.tech/labs.

License

MIT © Schuon Technologies GmbH