Hi HN — I’m the developer of NetViews, a macOS utility I built because I wanted better visibility into what was actually happening on my wired and wireless networks.

I live in the CLI, but for discovery and ongoing monitoring, I kept bouncing between tools, terminals, and mental context switches. I wanted something faster and more visual, without losing technical depth — so I built a GUI that brings my favorite diagnostics together in one place.

About three months ago, I shared an early version here and got a ton of great feedback. I listened: a new name (it was PingStalker), a longer trial, and a lot of new features. Today I’m excited to share NetViews 2.3.

NetViews started because I wanted to know if something on the network was scanning my machine. Once I had that, I wanted quick access to core details—external IP, Wi-Fi data, and local topology. Then I wanted more: fast, reliable scans using ARP tables and ICMP.

As a Wi-Fi engineer, I couldn’t stop there. I kept adding ways to surface what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

Discovery & Scanning: * ARP, ICMP, mDNS, and DNS discovery to enumerate every device on your subnet (IP, MAC, vendor, open ports). * Fast scans using ARP tables first, then ICMP, to avoid the usual “nmap wait”.

Wireless Visibility: * Detailed Wi-Fi connection performance and signal data. * Visual and audible tools to quickly locate the access point you’re associated with.

Monitoring & Timelines: * Connection and ping timelines over 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours. * Continuous “live ping” monitoring to visualize latency spikes, packet loss, and reconnects.

Low-level Traffic (but only what matters): * Live capture of DHCP, ARP, 802.1X, LLDP/CDP, ICMP, and off-subnet chatter. * mDNS decoded into human-readable output (this took months of deep dives).

Under the hood, it’s written in Swift. It uses low-level BSD sockets for ICMP and ARP, Apple’s Network framework for interface enumeration, and selectively wraps existing command-line tools where they’re still the best option. The focus has been on speed and low overhead.

I’d love feedback from anyone who builds or uses network diagnostic tools: - Does this fill a gap you’ve personally hit on macOS? - Are there better approaches to scan speed or event visualization that you’ve used? - What diagnostics do you still find yourself dropping to the CLI for?

Details and screenshots: https://netviews.app There’s a free trial and paid licenses; I’m funding development directly rather than ads or subscriptions. Licenses include free upgrades.

Happy to answer any technical questions about the implementation, Swift APIs, or macOS permission model.

It looks very slick!

Cool to see more network tools for macOS.

For anyone who does prefer a CLI-based approach, I maintain RustNet https://github.com/domcyrus/rustnet which is open source and cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) with real-time connection monitoring, deep packet inspection, process identification, and a terminal UI. Obviously a different kind of tool than a polished GUI app like this, but if you live in the terminal or want something you can script and automate, it might be worth a look.

On the macOS network tools side, have you looked into PKTAP? I use it in RustNet to get process-level attribution for network connections. Might be worth exploring if you want to tie traffic back to specific processes.

Congratulations on shipping! Looks awesome.

Minor bug: I tried opening the WebP screen shots in another tab so I could zoom and see them more clearly, and it does not work. Chrome renders the WebP image data as text, and Safari prompts you to download it. This appears to be because the web server is not returning a `Content-Type` header for these URLs:

curl --head https://www.netviews.app/_astro/ss7.D8bYvHF6_1awjYx.webp

EDIT: Fixed! I see a Content-Type header now

Looks very neat.

Have you considered offering it through the App Store? I would pay a modestly higher price for that. Or for open source.

But the combination of closed source and not being on the App Store is a bit of a dealbreaker for me.

If I may offer a marketing suggestion - make it easy for people to do a “proam” workflow to setup their own network. A “one click to diagnose and visualize your Wi-Fi setup”. And then write content around that.

This tool looks more powerful than what I would use, but if there were a kid version, I’d like someone to tell me how to improve my network performance.

Is it possible to buy the standard version and upgrade to the pro later for the difference between the two pricing tiers ($30)?

Looks useful and I like the UI, it reminds me of UniFi. After a few minutes I had to force-quit and sent a report. I will buy it, I love messing about and have a reasonably complex home network and have been getting by with a mix of Unix and homemade tools; this is nicer.

Looks great. I bought a license just so I'm sure I've got it next time I'm debugging a network issue.

I downloaded, tried to try but I got "You've already used your 7-day trial on this Mac."

This looks so pretty and awesome :)

Great job, I will give it a try. As I'm more interested for personal use, can it help me find the best WiFi channel to use for my network, as I live in a dense populated area?

Looks nice. MacOS has needed something like this for quite a while.

Excellent tool so far. Thanks for getting this out there.