Sneak Peek: Ration
Long time members of the forum will be familiar with the upcoming application from our very own
Jedda -
Ration. Admittedly it has been a long time coming,
some doubters even called it vaporware, but a public Beta is finally
about to be released and I have the pleasure of giving MacTalk a sneak peek!
What is it?
From the horses mouth; at the moment, not everything it will be. Ration basically aims to be a fully featured application for the monitoring and control of your monthly internet quota. Right now, however, the public Beta is missing a few of these features as their development is still ongoing. A discussion of the coming features appears later in this article.
The ISP's supported in the current release are; Optusnet, TPG, Internode and iiNet with support for Bigpond and many others coming very soon.
So what does it look like?
Ration is just oozing with that creamy OSX Cocoa goodness and is by far the best looking usage meter I have seen.
In its idle state, Ration blends nicely into your menu bar displaying your current usage as a % of your monthly quota.
The first time you run the app, you are presented with the options to select your ISP and enter your username and password - that's it! You are then ready to rock.
Clicking the menu bar icon you are presented with the following display, giving a quick overview of your current quota situation. The small arrow at the top of each graph represents where you should be with regards to your usage and billing cycle. If you are under this, your graph will be green, over it, the graph will be red. Simple as that - just a glance to see if you need to slow down or speed up with those Linux distros...
Clicking preferences gives you a whole range of options, quite a few of which are still under development.
Clicking the option for 'Show Cycle Summary' is when things get really cool, with detailed information on days elapsed, quota used so far, quota remaining, daily average usage and the amount of data you can use per day for the rest of the month all being just a click away. Speed test implementation is apparently still a while away from proper integration and part of a supposedly 'secret big upcoming feature'.
What's there, what's not and what's coming
Although very cool, the current Beta of Ration is nowhere yet near what it is going to be. Perhaps the biggest missing feature is the support for Triggers (shown above greyed out in the preferences menu). These will enable you to set commands for other programs according to your current quota situation. For example, you can tell Ration that if your offpeak quota is less than 80% of your monthly allowance, start your bit torrent application automatically at the beginning of your offpeak period each day. It looks a bit like this (this is NOT the public beta);
This also presents the opportunity for other very awesome things. One such example given to me by the developer; Because of the way Ration integrates Growl, it is possible to set up a
Growl alert that says (literally or in text) something like this every time the quota data refreshes; "You are currently at 30% of your cycle and have used 77% of your offpeak usage. You will need to reduce your offpeak usage by 597MB per day on average".
Cool, huh!? Now the bad news.... Due to the fact that there aren't yet enough plug-ins available, this feature isn't activated in the current public beta. The good news - it is coming very soon...about a month or so away according to Jedda.
Think Ration could look even better? Well you're in luck - our very own GUI legend marc is helping to design some new viewstyles for the next beta. Jedda's vision for the application is to make it highly customisable, with the developer community embracing it to create a wide range of plug-ins for a heap more features.
The verdict - things are only just beginning and Ration already rocks!
You can get your grubby hands on the public Beta of Ration at 6.00pm Sunday 28 September from
here (you can even webclip that countdown if you are really keen!). Jedda has made it super easy to report bugs from within the app (click the little insect looking thing at the bottom of the main overview window) and is encouraging all users to tear it to pieces and tell him what needs to be fixed!
