Support

Questions, bugs or ideas for Fivebars.

Contact

Email hi at callingcodes dot com

Common questions

Where is the app after I open it?

Fivebars has no Dock icon. Look for the five bars and a ping time in the menu bar. Click them, with either button, to open the menu: the chart and statistics on top, then Reset Session Stats, Check for Updates, Settings, About and Quit.

What do the bars mean?

They score your last 30 pings, counting the newest most. Five bars (Excellent) means fast replies and nothing lost; four is Good, three Fair, two Poor, one Very poor. A ping counts as slow above your slow ping threshold, 100 ms by default; change it in Settings.

The bars show a warning triangle and "Failed".

No reply arrived for 8 seconds (the 4 second ping timeout plus 4 seconds), or the host could not be looked up. Click the triangle: the menu says why (no network connection, host not found, or no replies) and offers Change Host. Fivebars keeps retrying, and starts again by itself after sleep, Wi-Fi changes, VPNs and DNS failures. If the cause is the host, check that it answers pings.

I don't get Connection Up/Down alerts.

Turn on Connection Up/Down Alerts in Settings and allow notifications when asked. If you declined, re-enable them in System Settings > Notifications > Fivebars.

macOS won't open the app on another Mac.

The app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized. Control-click it and choose Open, or allow it in System Settings > Privacy & Security.