Pingky

A small, cheerful witness to the quality of your connection.

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Airplane Wi-Fi drops out and you can't tell if it's slow, dying, or gone — the spinner just spins.

Pingky pings a host once a second and shows the result as a grid of little boxes: green when it's fast, red when it's slow, black when a packet is dropped. One glance tells you whether to keep waiting or give up.

It watches 8.8.8.8 out of the box, but the Ping Target menu takes anything — Cloudflare, your router's IP, a hostname, even a pasted URL (https://netflix.com/browse pings netflix.com).

It won't bring the Wi-Fi back. But at least you'll know.

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What you're looking at

• 3,000 pings of memory — about fifty minutes of history, packed into a flush 100 × 30 grid of boxes.
• The newest ping lives in the top-right corner, and time fills downward then leftward, so the most recent truth is always where your eye lands first.
• Green is roughly 0 ms; red is 1000 ms or worse; everything between is an honest gradient.
• A black box is a dropped packet — a small, dignified tombstone for a request that never came home.
• A header keeps the running score: current latency, packet loss, and p50 / p90 / p99 over both the last five minutes and the whole window.
• It floats above your other windows, follows you across Spaces, and you can drag it anywhere you like. It remembers where you left it.

Running it

You'll need macOS 14+ and a Swift toolchain. Pingky leans on the system /sbin/ping, which is already privileged, so there's no sudo, no helper, no ceremony.

swift run

A small wave.3.right icon appears in your menu bar — Show / Hide and Quit live there. The panel drifts into the top-right of your screen and gets to work.

Making it a real app

./make-app.sh        # builds Pingky.app, icon and all, ad-hoc signed
open Pingky.app

Drop Pingky.app into /Applications, add it to System Settings → General → Login Items, and it'll be waiting for you on every boot — including the one you do in seat 14C, hopefully, while the cabin lights are still dim.

How it actually works

Three small pieces, nothing clever:

• PingMonitor fires a one-second timer, shells out to /sbin/ping -c 1 -W 1000 <target> off the main thread, parses the time=…, and appends the result to a 3,000-entry ring buffer. The target is whatever you pick in the menu (IPs, hostnames, and URLs all normalize to a pingable host).
• PingGridView draws that whole buffer in a single SwiftUI Canvas pass — three thousand boxes, no perceptible cost.
• AppDelegate hangs it all in a borderless, blurred, always-on-top NSPanel.

The mascot, for the record, was rendered entirely in CoreGraphics (generate_icon.swift). He emits the same green-to-red waves you'll come to either love or dread.

Buy me a coffee

Pingky is free, and it always will be. But if it ever earns its keep — if it spares you one needless refresh at 35,000 feet, or simply makes the waiting a little more bearable — you'll find a Buy me a coffee ☕ item tucked into the menu-bar menu, and a sponsor button up top. Entirely optional, deeply appreciated, and roughly the price of the airport espresso I'm probably drinking while you read this.

License

MIT. Free as in take it on your next flight. Do whatever you like with it.