Anyone who regularly uses public Wi-Fi at an airport, hotel or café knows that being connected to a network and having access to the Internet are not the same thing. Unfortunately, your Mac isn’t very good at telling you whether you’re actually online or not, which can lead to frustrating troubleshooting.

A free application called Online Check solves this problem. It is a menu bar icon that turns red when you are offline. You can also ask it to send you notifications when your online status changes. It is a simple program, but a lifesaver if you are somewhere with an unstable connection. You can install Online Check from the Mac App Store or the developer's website.

I used to work in IT, which meant I spent a lot of time troubleshooting network connectivity issues. Typically, the quickest way to test if your internet connection is working on a Mac is to open Terminal and type “ping apple.com.” This will initiate an attempt to connect to Apple.com. This will let you know if your internet connection is actually working. Online Check is just a menu bar app that does this for you on a regular basis.

Online Check’s menu bar icon gives you quick access to your Mac’s Wi-Fi settings, which is helpful for troubleshooting. You can also click a button to see a log of when your computer connected to the internet and when it disconnected.