A few weeks ago, we released our brand-new application, Connection Explorer. The initial feedback has been helpful as we continue to evolve the application and add new features while making excellent progress towards a general release.
The core feature of the application, the map view, has been described as a “blacklight for your PC” which might be the best description of Connection Explorer yet. The goal is to expose all the external connections your device is making so that you can visually see where all of your data is going each and every day.
We are currently working on the next beta release that results in better performance as the application has been updated to .NET 10 and fixed a couple of the early bugs that have been reported such as dark mode not being persistent across sessions and a couple of other items as well. We have also been experimenting with different ways to help with dot density and exploration in these congested areas, a working prototype shown below.
But of all the feedback we have received, the best comments and emails are related to users blocking connections and taking back small bites of their own privacy. We often forget about applications that are installed that we do not run frequently and sometimes those applications are still running and sharing data about your device – Connection Explorer makes it very easy to see this activity.
Functional prototype of dot-density focus mode.
One of the core features of the application are the alerts and a top request is to incorporate the native toast notifications in Windows for when an event occurs. While this is all possible (and actually wired up but it’s turned off) the challenge is that if a rule is configured to capture a wide variety of scenarios, the toast flyouts become far too frequent and you quickly hit alert fatigue.
This doesn’t mean we won’t ever enable the feature but making sure the application doesn’t become part of the problem it’s trying to solve is a big pillar of development methodology. One such area you can see this in practice is that there are multiple guardrails for creating alerts related to DNS activity (if you select Everytime you will see it) with proactive warnings about the volume that will be created and for those who ignore this warning, optimizations for the Alert view are enabled to prevent information overload and slowdown the application.
As we continue to develop the application, your feedback is helping shape and form the direction we are taking with this new product. If you haven’t tried it out yet, you can learn more about the application on it’s page or if you have Object Desktop, the application can be downloaded today as it is included in the suite.
