Comments on: TPG Usage Widget for OS X

By: Thursday How-To: Monitor Your Data Usage | MacTalk Australia

Thursday How-To: Monitor Your Data Usage | MacTalk Australia — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:57:27 +0000

[…] TPG: If you’re brave enough to go with TPG, you can find widgets here and here […]

By: Patchy

Patchy — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:20:17 +0000

Hey great job on the widget, I was sick of logging into the crappy TPG site to check my account usage. Much better with this widget, simple presentation of the info, I can tell at a glance what my usage it.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:43:12 +0000

Sorry, now I understand what you’ve done. I just saw your other blog trail (?p=21, we’re on ?p=14) and saw that you have made these changes already (although you’ve gone for within-a-day-from-going-over being yellow rather than once you are over). Oops. Still, I wouldn’t mind a bit more detail in the graph (more lights) and a corresponding bar graph showing time progress through the billing period.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:32:22 +0000

I reckon everyone knows their target, and the progress bar “lights” are a good enough warning that you’re approaching the end. Might I suggest that you change the colour of all the lights depending on if you’re behind, ahead or REALLY ahead of your pro-rata usage?

For example, if you’re 6 days into a 30 day month (20% of the way through the period) and you’ve used less than 20% of your limit, then the lights are green. If you’ve used 20% of your downloads, or are up to 10% over of your limit then the lights go yellow, and if you’re more than 10% over your limit then the lights go red.

What do you think?

By: ethan

ethan — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:43:00 +0000

Any thoughts on the current approach I’ve taken, with setting the thresholds for the yellow and red sections of the bar based on where you *should* be (assuming you’re aiming for 100% usage )

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:28:40 +0000

Hi, just signed up with TPG after being with Netspace for years. The widget I had there was comprehensive, and you’ve done a good job. The other TPG widget didn’t work for me either.

I agree with the other guys - a little bar showing the progress of time through the billing period on the same scale as our usage will give us an idea of if we’re ahead or behind our download limit. The resolution might need to be a bit finer than the 13 indicators you show now - perhaps 31 divisions would be logical. That might require smaller indicators, although I wouldn’t care if the widget was three times wider (I don’t have that much on my Dashboard).

Great job so far.

By: ethan

ethan — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 02:16:05 +0000

Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ve added the expiry date to the front of the widget so that it will display the expiry date, or number of days left (if under a week)

Steven, I’ll look at your suggestion soon… sounds like an interesting idea

By: Steven

Steven — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:33:36 +0000

Great widget… Would also be nice if it showed what usage should be at that date if you used the max daily average (ie: number of days since starting new billing period * Download Cap/month days). On 40gb peak that’s about 1.3gb/day

I have a little table drawn on a post-it note that I can refer to but if another band went behind it would be great. Then you could tell if you are ahead of your average and take it easy to prevent disappointment later in the month.

Not the best written explanation above, but its late here…
Thanks!

By: Gerard

Gerard — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:15:18 +0000

Love the widget but what would be super cool is some idea on how many days you have left.

Cheers

Gerard