Is there an OS X equivalent to the little system tray icon that shows network status and activity for local area connection or wireless network connection? It's useful because it tells me whether there's any activity by the network card.
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Network status icon next to clock like Windows?
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There are a host of widgets that provide this feature but what exactly do you want to know about your network adapters?
In Windows, the icon blinks whenever it's trying to access a website or connect to another computer on the network - basically any kind of connection activity. I take it from your response that OS X doesn't provide something like that.
The Network preference pane provides connectivity information.
It would be annoying to have to bring it up often.
But I'd want to be able to monitor this absolutely all the time, hence the system tray in Windows, or the equivalent 'system tray' area by the OS X clock.
That's a start, but I'm looking more for the equivalent of an LED blinking whenever there's any connection activity, and not so much numbers watching. I'm sure this app won't contribute too much to resources, but it still seems like overkill.
Check out MenuMeters. Don't know if it can be used to display the activity for more than one interface at a time on the menubar, though. Haven't tried.
MenuMeters can be configured to give you what you want. However just showing so little information, I don't really see the use in. There's bound to be constant activity on your network connection whatever you're doing, unless I suppose you set a larger minimum threshold for when the meters will show activity (dunno if MenuMeters can do that). Personally I think a graph or numbers like MenuMeters and iStatMenus offer would be much more helpful, but to each his own. 