Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Nice Trace - App Review



Are you interested in finding out the route your data takes from you to... wherever?

And, possibly more importantly, the location of any bottlenecks?

Then, check out this App.

Now for the ACIDS test:

Aesthetics
The entry screen is very uncluttered, being limited to an information (help) icon, a settings icon (where you can set thresholds, or just leave to the defaults), and the all-important address.

Enter a Host name or IP address in the bar and let the App do its thing.

The App now displays all the hops required to get from your device to the address, together with plenty of information on speed and loss.

Touching any of the hops brings up a screen which displays the Host name, IP Address, Network range, Country, Statistics (sent, received, lost, RTT, loss as percentage).

Further touching any of the first three parameters brings up detailed Whois information.

There is a useful 'getting started' video at http://j.mp/nicetrace_vids

Cost
The App costs $2.

Indispensability
This could be useful in tracing why accessing certain sites is slow, otherwise, it will interest those who are nosey.

Dependability
The App is designed for the smaller screen of the iPhone but works fine in 1x and 2x modes on an iPad.

Security
This is much more a case of getting information, rather than giving it.

ACIDS Test Rating:

More info than you can shake a stick at.

To find out how the ACIDS Test works, click here.


You can get Nice Trace here and support for the App here.


1 comment:

  1. The developer advises that there has been an update to version 1.9.9 of the App.

    This includes the following enhancements and alterations:

    - fully supports iPad as a universal app
    · supports native iPad screen resolution
    · supports Portrait orientations
    · one app for all devices
    - significantly improved WHOIS
    · automatically recognizes domain part of a hostname
    · now supports 4220 domain zones in total (+ 2314 new)
    · supports all 528 top level domain zones (+ 285 new)
    · supports 3692 second level domain zones (+ 2029 new)
    · supports all 61 IDN TLD (+ 37 new)
    · 3727 zones with full WHOIS
    · 493 zones with DNS info
    · all zones with WHOIS are manually verified
    · improved IPv4 and IPv6 lookup
    · improved ASN lookup
    · fixed WHOIS encoding for many international zones
    - updated IP to country database
    - improved keyboard handling
    - improved IDN parsing
    - improved DNS parsing
    - fixed memory leaks
    - fixed possible crashes

    ReplyDelete

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