By NMT | No Comments
Last updated: Friday, July 24, 2009

One problem inherent to the sub-genre of iPhone Wi-fi utilities is that the iPhone OS itself makes for a pretty decent Wi-fi-hotspot-tracker. Mind you, this doesn’t seem to have put developers off and WifiTrak is a fairly polished piece of software, boasting a number of features which the iPhone’s Settings application can’t match. A quick recap of what’s built into every iPhone and iPod Touch: ‘Settings | Wi-Fi’ shows you all the networks within range, along with icons to show their security status (locked/open) and an idea of strength using a three bar system. Tap on an ‘Open’ network and the chances are good that you’ll be connected and online. So why do you need a third party utility?Well, in truth, you don’t, especially if this is something you don’t do every day, but before you stop reading it’s worth noting that WifiTrak adds a number of nice to have features which will help the hardened ‘war driving’ power user. After all, you may be addicted to heavy video streaming and large podcasts, and Wi-Fi may be the only way to go. WifiTrak helps mainly by offering auto-connecting and auto-checking of open networks (though not all these settings are on by default). It also sorts the networks within range and keeps the most promising ones at the top of its list. When connected successfully, it can optionally sound an alert or even launch Safari (or Mail). One oddity of WifiTrak is the way the strength of each network is depicted, with negative numbers – it’s not entirely clear how these are supposed to work and a graphical bar would have been easier to understand. The upshot of all this is that you can be out and about and want a Wi-Fi fix. ALL you’ve got to do is start up WifiTrak and wait. Assuming you’ve set it up properly, it’ll keep scanning for networks as you walk, will work out any open networks, attempt a connection and, if successful, launch Safari so that you can go straight into web browsing, for example. In use, WifiTrak largely works as advertised, although it (oddly) doesn’t pick up the Wi-Fi settings from the iPhone OS, so you’ll have to input the WEP or WPA keys for any known networks that you also want to use – WifiTrak even goes so far, when it starts, as to disconnect from a known network that you’re already connected to, until such time as you give it the security codes too. Not a huge problem given the typical WifiTrak use case, but this lack of cooperation seems a bit petty.As with many other iPhone utilities, WifiTrak is hit hard by being limited by the OS, so you can’t just leave it running in the background – a great shame and yet another argument for Apple to relent and allow proper multitasking on the iPhone.A tidy little utility but one for hardened Wi-Fi addicts only, I feel. This article was published by iphoneapplicationlist.com

Original post: 
WifiTrak

CommentSubscribe