PacketStream provides point-and-click activation of the Mac's built-in network monitoring program, which is usually available only from the command line. By clicking a few buttons, you can monitor data as it streams over your network--especially useful for checking web traffic, network bottlenecks, or even suspicious network activity. All network data is displayed in the application itself, and you can save the data to a file for further analysis later. PacketStream provides a user-friendly way to configure and use the Mac's network monitoring tools. It is easier than typing in cryptic commands in Terminal. As a native Aqua application, it is more intuitive to use than complex, hard-to-install, Unix-based GUI programs. And it is simpler than more expensive "swiss army knife" network programs, which are overkill for most users.
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />slow, lots of pizza cursors, very unclear what is going on, have to force quit to stop trace.
complete waste of time
Slow, Worthless
Plazman
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This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This thing takes forever to get started (force quit it the first time because I thought it was hung up). Once it's started it's really, really slow to update. It displays a watch cursor or beach ball most of the time. Totally unusable. And he's trying to charge MONEY for this? Right.
yeah I gotta agree with the other complaints here
newfusion
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This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />And furthermore, for me there is no difference in the basic, detailed, or highly detailed level of program output.
And still more... this thing phones home every startup, with no way to turn it off in prefs (Little Snitch to the rescue). What is it doing exactly... version check... or something more sinister?
I'll check it out again at v4 or so. 2.1 is waaaay too far away from anything useful.
I feel sorry for the developers
cochinescu
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This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />It's just a gui for tcpdump.
And yeah, taking ages to start/stop.
And crushing while trying to access the configuration panel.
Why would anyone buy this?
Don't bother
BiG77
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This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Excruciatingly slow -- when it works at all. Asks for password every time a trace is started, then spins a beachball for a while. After some traffic, I stop the trace and wait a while longer. If I'm lucky(?) a trace will eventually appear, though often, after a very long wait control is finally returned to me but nothing at all appears.
And if something DOES display, you can't select any text -- I guess you have to save to a file first so you could copy/paste text via other programs. And you need to run the trace again to switch detail levels.
The "extensive help" is not at all extensive and basically tells you only totally obvious things like a screen shot showing you how to select your font from a standard font selection dialog -- duh! It omits anything which might help to unravel the mysteries of the program, like the list of protocols on the left (Are they Pre-filters? Post-filters? Why is there a disclosure triangle? But perhaps that doesn't matter since they don't work for me anyhow best as I can tell.)
Finally, notice the license agreement (the biggest portion of the Help document!) allows for use only on a single machine (not a single at a time, but a single machine period) and allows us to make at most one backup copy. I certainly keep more than one backup of my machine, but fortunately this junk isn't staying on my machine so at least I won't be in violation of the agreement.