New Features
- We built a brand new "Start Screen" for Tonic! It's similar to the old one, but has a nicer layout, tells you more about the status of connected packet capture adapters, and gives you the option to open a PCAP file.
- Additionally, we implemented an animation in the background of the Start Screen! It has something to do with toast. If you know why, Tweet us at @MetaGeek! If you enjoy toast, read on to find our other toasty release notes.
- In the BSSID View, in the Airtime Graph, we now show a time slice for Broadcast! Now you can see how much time is consumed by broadcast traffic, such as Beacons.
- You've probably noticed that when you hover your mouse over the multi-layer pie charts, a tooltip appears! In the tooltip, we used to show a small "color swatch" that matched the slice and layer of the chart that the mouse was hovering over. We've replaced the generic swatch with icons, depending on what the slice represents! Packets and Packet Types get little envelopes, Broadcast gets an icon, and Clients get an icon according to their device type! If we don't know the client device type, then we just show a generic client icon. That wraps up the "envelopification" of Tonic!
- Tonic had several different ways of displaying notifications, so we consolidated everything into one central framework! Notifications all appear in the same place now (across the top), have the same styling, support built-in buttons, and can be different colors. Fun fact: Internally, we call these notifications "Toasts". I mean, who doesn't love toast?! Speaking of toast, we recommend trying some "Cookie Butter" on toast sometime. It's amazing.
- Tonic now saves pcapng files, which include details about what the capture adapters were doing during the capture, all within the capture file!
- Additionally, Tonic can read in the capture adapter channels while it opens the pcapng file, so you can see what the adapters were doing during the capture! It's super, super neat.
Improvements
- We've updated the font in Tonic! We think it looks pretty sharp, and we hope you like it as much as we do!
- We fixed the style of the moveable splitters between the Networks Table and Spectrum Graphs! We fixed them! What have you done, Derek!? You've done nothing! Nothing!
- The whole Time Graph menu felt incomplete and unfinished, because it was incomplete and unfinished. Now, it's complete and finished!
- Tonic is now supports switching back to live data after opening a PCAP! It's also fully aware of the "state" it is in, whether looking at an opened PCAP, or viewing live data.
Bug Fixes
- Previously, the Retry Time Graph didn't seem to work correctly. We investigated the issue, and found a difference in how we calculated our "Retry Rate" indicator in the BSSID and Client Details Panes versus our Retry Time Graph. We made them the same, which makes the Retry Time Graph feel much better. Keep in mind that the Retry Rate indicator in the BSSID and Client Detail Panes is an average over whatever timespan you have selected, so they won't track perfectly with the graph (which is by design).
- There was a bug that caused the network "ziggurats" (yep, that's what we call them!) to not align with the spectrum or with the channel markers in the 5 GHz band. We've realigned everything, so it looks right now!
- We replaced the confusing (and broken, lol) "Connected Rate" indicator in the Client Details pane with "Client Tx Rate" and "Client Rx Rate", so you can watch what data rates the AP and client are using in real-time.
- Technically, it's possible to hot plug and unplug packet capture adapters while Tonic is running, but we don't recommend doing that. Still, accidents happen, and Tonic would get into a pretty bad state if all of the adapters are disconnected. To smooth things out a bit, this update adds a notification to tell you that the last adapter has been removed, and it guides you to restart Tonic. It uses our fancy new toast system, too!
- If your MetaGeek Account didn't have a MetaGeek Enterprise Suite subscription, and you tried to log into Tonic, it would silently return you to the login window of no indication of what went wrong! Now Tonic shows you a message, explaining that you need a MetaGeek Enterprise Suite subscription to continue. It's the small things.
- In trial mode, you'll have the opportunity to sign into a MetaGeek Account in each subsequent launch. There's also a button to continue your free 14-day trial.
- Some users who were either preparing to start a trial or continue a trial would find that their trial period had expired too soon. Tonic is meant to offer a fast, free, frictionless 14-day trial, so we fixed the bug that was causing the trial to end too soon. Tell all of your friends! That we... uh... fixed a bug.
- The developers found a crash, due to how we were handling our Time Graph data trimming. They added extra error checking and exception handling, and fixed the crash! Kinda boring, but important!
