iStumbler: The Leading Wireless Discovery Tool for Mac OS X

Originally downloaded 8/29/06. Having recently acquired a laptop (my first!), I suspect I’ll find better wireless access tools a necessity sooner or later. iStumbler comes highly recommended, is widely used, is still donationware, and has a whole toolkit-full of tricks. I think I’m going to like it, too!

Update 1/9/07. Yep, iStumbler is one of the tools to put on your desktop when you’re troubleshooting wireless network issues. I still don’t use a laptop much, but I’ve found iStumbler quite useful along with a couple of other tools for identifying sources of wireless signals, and their strengths and other attributes. If you connect to networks wirelessly, whether at home or on the road, I highly recommend bringing this little freebie along with you.

iStumbler has more interesting little parts than you might think at first glance… hence the swiss army knife metaphor. The screenshots here show a few of the various views. With its plug-in architecture, iStumbler has added new features over time, and it can now also detect and display Bluetooth and Bonjour sources, as well as connect to them. Keep in mind that this tool is donationware, so if you find you rely on iStumbler a lot, please give this guy $20 or so. He’s always making improvements, both visual and functional… for example, the latest revision incorporates the awesome Sparkle framework for software updates. As if all that weren’t enough, it’s worth noting that iStumbler utilizes Growl for notifications, provides a Dashboard widget for spectrum analysis, and is open-source… so you can download the xCode project and work on it yourself! Just be sure to give back if you make any improvements.

Version as tested: 97