This is a great little utility to help you visualize the strength of your wireless network at various places in your home or office setting. I just used it to get confirmation that my Apple Express base station was not properly configured in regards to its ability to extend the range of my network, as flowing from my Apple Extreme base station, located near my desktop computers in my home office. I knew something was wrong, but seeing the color-coded depiction of the various levels of signal strength confirmed the faulty configuration and triggered me to go into the Airport Utility to correct the problem. Thanks to the this little tool, I finally got the ability to have a strong enough network signal to connect to the Internet and to my desktop Macs from anywhere within my house, including out on the porch.

Of course, I had the right devices: I just did not configure them correctly.

NetSpot pointed that out to me in a more dramatic fashion that another useful tool within this category, namely, AirRadar, which I also recommend. AirRadar scans all of the wireless networks within its earshot and can produce statistics along with a graph of the signal strength and noise. That is useful information to be sure. AirRadar creates its profile depending on the physical location of your laptop. If you physically move your laptop, your stats and graph will change.

NetSpot appears to use of that same snapshotting of a laptop's location in comparison to a base station, but it goes one step further than AirRadar (which is designed for a different purpose) in the sense that, when you create your mapping of your network, you physically carry your laptop from point to point and you direct NetSpot to take a survey of the signal strength of your network at that particular point. When you are all done carrying your laptop to your various locations, you stop the scanning, and NetSpot displays a color-coded map, overlaid on the diagram you previously drew of your home of office layout, to show you the relative strength of the network signal to each and every spot on your survey. That's cool!

The overall application would benefit from the addition of some basic instructions or a short instructional video to step you through things, so, if you're like me, you might find yourself a little lost in the beginning. But once you figure out how the app works, it's pretty easy to get your network mapping done.

10 October 2011: Is Radio Gaga still in business, or did it go ga-ga, bye-bye? I have three licenses, and I used this app in the past. I like it. But I haven't used it quite a while.

Today, I launched it, but I got a message saying the app could not connect to its server and that the server may be down for maintenance. So, I tried to connect to the developer's site, and I got a "Gaga Factory" page that is not at all related to the product and looks nothing like the actual developer site.

In my humble opinion, this is poor management, no matter how good the actual app may be. Any developer that provides an Internet-based service that is intrinsically based upon its server being operational ought to have a redundant server somewhere, even in another country, if necessary, to provide uninterrupted service.

Similarly, any developer which puts its informational website, home page, instructional manual, tech support, and all other information on the same single server where it also provides a radio station service that occasionally goes down for "maintenance" is quite a few beers shy of a six-pack. Such a developer is hardly worthy of support. After all, they don't provide any. What entitles them to get any ... in the form of paying customers?

Accordingly, I have downgraded my rating for this app, by taking into consideration that Radio Gaga is a SERVICE, not merely an app. Features rank high; but value and stability rank low.

To answer a question posed earlier, as well as to give my honest rating for this "Swiss army knife of utilities," there is no adequate, all-in-one replacement for FileBuddy! I have been using daily for many years, and I find that this program truly defines the meaning of "utility" for the world of software.

Unlike many of the one-trick ponies offered here which often do little more than make calls to something that the OS itself can do, this application exploited file-finding capabilities and structural analysis of a hard drive file like no other I've ever seen. I especially like FileBuddy's ability to take "snapshots" of a hard drive at any moment in time AND to allow me to compare the snapshots I take to know what files have changed, what files have been replaced, what files have been deleted, and what files have been moved.

While it is regrettable that developer Lawrence Harris is no longer actively developing this superior applications for reasons of his own, it is a testament to his skill as a programmer and as a marketer that he crafted a utility that has proven so much value to so many people throughout the world.

Critics and others who complain that the application is not current with the latest MAC OS's being pushed at us by Apple ought to take a good hard look in the mirror before they display their naivete or project their own negativity into the reasons why the developer no longer can, or will, develop the product further. Have some respect.

Is this software obsolete? There is no download. Both links go to an Apple page to initiate troubleshooting, but no option to download this software is provided there.

Since the Mac OS has always allowed us to make an alias to any application or document or folder or file that we choose, and since we can put all those aliases into nicely organized parent folders and sub-folders to arrange in any way we choose, what is the point of an application like this?

I just don't see its value. I'd rather create aliases. They're free, and I have complete control on how I use them, as well as where I put them.