SurplusMeter

To the poster with one star: read the documents within disk image The application works great on my Panther (10.3.9) system. Drag the app's icon onto Desktop AND in the Dock. Launch it. Note: the app cannot be terminated with Quit command, but only via Force Quit command in Activity Monitor utility (in Applications/Utilities under My Processes)

BUG REPORT: if your mac crashes and you have to do a hard reboot (by holding down power button), surplusmeter loses track of its stats because surplusmeter_data.plist gets corrupted. it needs better data recovery in case of system crashes.

No longer works under 10.6.7; at least not for me.

MU you have the wrong application icon. The application icon you show for surplusmeter is the old icon for perfect diet tracker.

A promising app, and a useful program concept, bit I can't help but notice the Accumulated Surplus calculation is occasionally way off, as is the remainder of month calculation. I've been testing SurplusMeter v2.0.3 since January, and I found that these figures are unreliable, based on the way they are calculated. As an example, I started a usage cycle yesterday, and during the day used ~300MB less than my daily allotment. Today, while still more than 400MB below my daily allotment, the Accumulated Surplus reads -45.3MB, and the "remainder of month" calculation is in the red, even though the average daily usage is just over half of the daily allowance. The "remainder of the month" calculation assumes that the current day has not yet begun and merely divides the total MB available for the month by the number of days left, where it should take into account the % of the current day already over and how much data is being used daily. In other words, this figure is only really accurate between midnight and the first byte of network activity of a given day, and approaches a greater degree of accuracy the more days go by. The same applies for the accumulated surplus; it assumes that all data transferred so far was a part of the preceding day(s) allotment, and doesn't take into account that some usage was from today or that there was an allocation made specifically for said usage. The system draws from the surplus first instead of the daily allocation, making it look like I'm in the red when I actually have hundreds of MB left. To illustrate: I assumed a stringent cap of 25GB for the month (31 days). Of the 1651.6 MB allotted for 2 days usage, I have used 871.3 MB, which should leave an available reservoir of 780.3 MB before it impacts future daily allowances negatively. The current calculations make it appear that I'm far in the red when I'm actually substantially in the black (or green as the case may be). Clearly, if I'm consistently using less than the daily allowance, the surplus should be close to an entire day worth of usage (or should only reflect the left-over from the previous day(s)), and the daily remainder for the month should be higher than the overall daily allowance. Needless to say, the app has limited usefulness as a result of this method of calculation. Blissfully, by the time I reach the end of a month, the calculations will average out a bit better and approach some semblance of reality, but until then I have to do my own math to predict the impacts of my usage trends accurately. I recommend reconsidering the calculation method to better reflect ongoing usage. For starters, not deducting from the surplus until the daily allotment has been exhausted would be a good start. Unfortunately, to accomplish this the system will have to keep a record of the usage at the precise beginning of the current day, and this may be impossible given the way SurplusMeter currently functions.

Need a way to exclude bandwidth used by local network traffic (e.g. local file transfer from Mac to Mac on same network). Maybe let the user to specify which IP's to ignore traffic. Also, I'm confused by the "Month starts on" field. Do I set it to 0 or 1 if I want all days of a single month included? I think this field should be hidden (show it as an advanced setting), and by default SurplusMeter should count from the first day of the month to the last day of the month. Aside from that, it seems to work ok.

Does what it says. Too bad it doesn't cap and you have to launch the app to see changes. Would be great if it could show your usage on menubar.

I have been using this program for months now and it has saved my life. I live in a small rural area and only have ADSL access via satellite with the speed limitations all servers seem to saddle us with. So this program is really helpful and easy to use. I only have a couple of buts: 1. When I go into the "big city" and can connect via WiFi I have to manually pause the program every time I turn on my computer before I start to navigate or download something. If I forget to, it screws up my calculations. It would be good to be able to turn it off and then have to turn it back on when I need it. 2. I can't reset the program and then recalculate the balances using the plus or minus buttons. Either I don't understand how to do or it does not work. Either possibility. Aside from that, it is an excellent program and I recommend it to anyone in similar circumstances.

Excellent to see that this is now a UB. However, the Archive is not showing GB to me as it suggests it should in the notes above, only bytes and MB. The one criticism I would have of this app is that it only runs in one user account at a time as far as I am aware, so if another person logs in on the same machine it doesn't track their usage in addition to your own (please correct me if this is wrong). If it did, it would be perfect. In other words, if there was some means of not only getting the value for how much each individual user has used, but also the total of all users' usage, it would be 5 stars instead of 4.

Thanks for the universal binary update. This is a great app that monitors Internet usage using a small user.agent program. The full program only needs to be run if you want to view the stats collected by the user.agent.