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Signifi Agent Release Notes

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Joel Crane
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2.2.0 (macOS and Windows)

2021-01-20

Release Notes

  • macOS and Windows
    • Big news: Signifi Agent for macOS is officially out of beta! This marks our “Signifi Agent for macOS 1.0” release. You might notice that the version number isn’t “1.0” though. Our Windows and macOS versions are the same codebase, so we’re going to start Signifi Agent for macOS with the same version number as the current Windows release. As a result, this initial release will be known as version 2.2. Ok, still with us? Great. Let’s get on with the actual release notes.
    • Signifi Agent regularly does automatic scans, but it checks network usage to make sure it doesn’t accidentally denial-of-service attack the user. The auto-scan logic was a bit complicated, so we simplified things a bit. The result is a bit less code, and more reliable automatic scans.
    • Previously, Signifi Agent had a “Guest Mode” that could be accessed without a MetaGeek Account. It caused some additional complexity, and locked the user out of any cloud-related Signifi functions (which is where most of Signifi’s functionality is). We decided to remove Guest Mode entirely, and instead encourage users to just grab a free trial.
  • macOS
    • Signifi Agent now runs out of the menu bar!
    • Additionally, Signifi Agent automatically launches after a reboot.
    • If you’re part of multiple Signifi teams, you can now select which team to use! We think that this will be the most useful for managed services providers, who have a bunch of teams to manage and choose from. Admittedly, it's also super useful for us when we're testing stuff.
    • Proxy settings are now configurable from the login window. Sweet!
    • There’s a complete About window now! It totally matches the Windows version. Aw yeah, feature parity! Exciting stuff. So exciting.
    • There was a bug that caused IP addresses to not be displayed during scans. All fixed!
    • During the Scanning progress, Signifi Agent kept getting stuck, and the user couldn’t proceed. We applied some WD-40 to the situation, and… there. That won’t get stuck anymore.
    • When a scan completes, uploads the results to Signifi Cloud. If anything goes wrong, we notify the user, and recommend that they try again. Hopefully, you never see this notification, but just know that it’s there (just in case).
    • Previously, the WAN Upload and Download link lines were always red, which wasn’t right! They’re working properly now: the lines are green if there isn’t much bandwidth being used, yellow if we think you’re getting close to using all of your available bandwidth, and red if you are using all of your available bandwidth.
  • Windows
    • We didn't make any noteworthy, Windows-only changes in this release (just the two cross-platform improvements above). It's pretty cool to see cross-platform improvements at work!

Known Issues

  • macOS
    • There’s still a tiny bug in how the Upload and Download charts work - if throughput in a time segment was zero, the chart shows a slightly negative value. We’ll get this fixed at some point (but we won’t bring it up in “Known Issues” anymore).
    • We’ve had a couple of users (literally two) report that Signifi thinks they’re connected with Ethernet, even if they don’t have an Ethernet adapter connected. We tried and tried to reproduce this problem, and just couldn’t. If you run into it, can you drop us a line at support@metageek.net? We could really use some help to get this one figured out. Thanks!
    • Last time, we pointed out that there was a possible bug for macOS 10.14 Mojave users, where some or all of the icons wouldn’t draw correctly. Now that macOS 12 Monterey has been released, Mojave is no longer officially supported by Apple. Additionally, pretty much every machine that could run Mojave is capable of running something newer. Because of this, we’ve decided to drop support for macOS 10.14 Mojave. Signifi Agent officially supports macOS 10.15 Catalina, macOS 11 Big Sur, and macOS 12 Monterey.
  • Windows
    • There aren't any issues that we know of in this release! As always, if/when you find something, let us know!

 

0.0.9.1 Beta 2 (macOS)

2021-09-30

Note: As always, we don't recommend using beta releases in production environments. We're getting a lot closer with Signifi Agent, but there are still lots of bugs and gaps in functionality. Don't give in to the temptation to use it in production quite yet!

Another Note: If you want to test-drive Signifi Agent for macOS, we strongly recommend grabbing a free 14-day trial, so you can test Signifi Agent and Signifi Cloud together. Be sure to invite some coworkers and friends to your Signifi team!

Release Notes

  • Previously, you couldn’t paste a password into the login window with ⌘+V. Vanessa couldn’t stand it, so she fixed it by adding an “Edit” menu to the macOS menu bar, which is required to enable pasting with a keyboard shortcut. Funny, huh? Also, isn’t Vanessa great?
  • We implemented the “Disconnected” network UI, which clearly shows that you aren’t connected to any kind of network.
  • We also implemented the “Ethernet” network UI. Note that it will allow you to click the Scan button, but it will ask you to connect to Wi-Fi to take a scan. For now, this is intentional, but in the future, we might implement a way for you to do tests on the wired side of your network. We’ll keep “noodling” on this.
  • There was a bug that caused LAN and WAN Latency to be way, way higher than it was supposed to be. The results that Signifi Agent provided, and what we could see with the ping command in the Terminal didn’t match at all, so we wrote a macOS-specific way to test latency in Signifi Agent. The reported LAN and WAN Latency seem to be very accurate now.
  • The authentication spinner that we used in the Beta 1 release was pretty ugly, so we updated it with another graphic that more closely matches the Windows version.
  • In dark mode, some of the colors for buttons and UI elements weren’t correct. They’re all correct now! Shout-out to Nabil (our UI designer) for designing a beautiful Dark Mode for Signifi Agent. We’re looking forward to showing you his other designs!
  • There wasn’t quite enough padding around the Network Diagram, but it’s fixed now. There were also some padding issues around various text items - also fixed!
  • The Location icon (which usually has a little house or coffee cup) wasn’t centered, but now, it’s exactly where it should be.
  • Speaking of things that were off-center: so were the Network Link lines! The good news is that they are centered now. You know, I could really learn something from those Network Link lines…
  • What?! More off-center things? Yes. The icons that appear during a scan weren’t centered. I’m sure you can guess what they’re like now.
  • Some labels around the application were bold, and they weren’t supposed to be. It was super, super technical… but we managed to successfully un-bold those text elements.
  • Ok, so you know the little purple bar at the top for notifying you about things? That's called a "toast". There was an icon in the auto scan toast that was messed up, so we swapped it out for an icon that isn't messed up.
  • The Upload and Download bar charts didn't draw correctly on non-Retina displays. Fixed!

Known Issues

  • In this Beta 2 release, Signifi Agent still doesn’t run as a menu bar application. Implementing Signifi Agent as a menu bar application is still top-of-mind for us.
  • There’s no way to configure Signifi Agent to automatically start with your computer. Users will need to remember to manually launch it, or you could use an external script to launch it when your machine starts up. Just like the menu bar thing, we plan to have this implemented before a final release.
  • Last time we checked, in macOS Mojave (and possibly other versions of macOS), none of the icons draw - you'll only see the colored backgrounds behind the icons. We didn't make any effort to fix this for the Beta 2 release, so it is probably still an issue.
  • The Upload and Download bar charts (that show your download and upload usage over time) have a small drawing bug, where they show a slight negative value when they should show “zero”. Apparently, there’s a bug in our charting library that causes this. We’re waiting for a fix from the charting library vendor. Fortunately, it’s pretty minor, so we aren’t too worried about it.
  • The “IP Address” field is blank in the scan results. We’re not sure what is up with that yet.
  • Like we noted last time, the WAN Upload and Download link lines are always red. That’s not right. They’re supposed to change colors based on network usage: green if there is little usage, yellow if we think you’re getting close to using all of your available bandwidth, and red if you are using all of your available bandwidth.
  • If you start in "Guest Mode" (which we don't recommend - grab a trial to get the full Signifi experience), you can get stuck being asked to subscribe. There's some weirdness in general around this that we plan to address.

0.0.6.13 Beta 1 (macOS)

2021-08-03

Note: We don't recommend using beta releases in production environments. We always say this for beta releases, but in this case, we really mean it.

Release Notes

  • This is the initial release of Signifi Agent for macOS! Giving you a list of changes feels a bit silly, since there was no public release prior to this. Since you’re a beta user, we figured that you might want to know what was done since our last major internal Alpha release.
  • Updated the colors and icons to match the new “Signifi” branding! Expect to see more adjustments to the icons (sizing, background) in the near future.
  • Previously, you couldn't use command + V to paste your password into the login window. At the very last minute, we fixed it for this release. Whew!
  • More reliably handles switching to “Work” and “Somewhere Else” site types.
  • As a hold-over from the Windows version, we were showing the “Receive” data rate. macOS doesn’t give us the receive data rate, so we removed that indicator - you’ll only see the “transmit” indicator in Signifi Agent. The receive direction arrows will copy whatever the transmit arrow color is.
  • If you left Signifi Agent running for several hours, it would crash. That’s bad, because crashes are bad, and users are supposed to let Signifi Agent run all of the time. Hopefully it's fixed, but if not, let us know.
  • In the bandwidth usage indicators, we used to show two decimal places. To keep things clean and consistent with everything else in Signifi, now we only show one decimal place.

Known Issues

  • Since this is a beta release, there are a lot of issues! Despite the long list of problems, we decided to release it anyway, so you can get an early look at the app. Thank you very much for being willing to test this for us!
  • Ultimately, Signifi Agent will run as a “Menu Bar” application (like the System Tray in Windows). It doesn’t do that yet, but it does need an open Window to keep running, so we recommend minimizing it into the dock for now. We hope to fix this in our "Beta 2" release.
  • If you switch to a new site (like connect to a different Wi-Fi network), Signifi Agent doesn’t handle the change very well. Agent looks at the SSID, Gateway MAC, and BSSID to determine if a site changed, and macOS is very, very slow to give us that data. We’ll keep looking for better ways to handle this, but know that for now, it takes a couple of minutes and causes Signifi Agent to behave strangely sometimes. We don't think that quickly switching networks will be a common use case for Signifi Agent, so we decided to let this one slide for now (but we do plan to fix or improve it).
  • In some cases (especially after letting the app sit for awhile), Signifi Agent will ask what your site type is (even if you haven't changed networks). After selecting "Home", it will stop on the "Scanning..." view and not progress any further. You'll have to quit the application and start it again to fix it. We almost didn't release this build because of this problem, but ultimately decided that you might be okay working around this, since it's a beta.
  • WAN and LAN latency are higher than the Windows version for some reason, even on the same network. Pings done from the Terminal in macOS doesn't match what Signifi Agent is reporting, so we know that the problem originates from within Signifi. We'll investigate this, and get it fixed.
  • The arrows between "Internet" and "Router" are supposed to change colors, depending on current usage. For example, green means there's plenty of bandwidth to spare. Red means you're at or exceeding your total available bandwidth (which is based on the last scan). Right now, they're always stuck on red.
  • When you add a room, it isn’t automatically selected in the drop-down combo box. That’s super annoying - we will fix that in the next release.
  • There are a lot of UI issues to polish, such as icons that aren’t centered (nearly all of them), and text that is bold when it should not be. We plan to fix all of that soon.
  • Unlike the Windows version, there’s currently no user interface to handle a “Disconnected” network state. We decided to hold off on implementing this to get Beta 1 out the door faster.
  • Similarly, there’s no UI to handle Ethernet connections.
  • During scans, there aren’t animations or unique colors on the icons.
  • After a scan is completed, we don’t yet show how many issues Signifi Cloud found. For now, just click on "View Audit Report" (which isn’t right either, lol) to visit Signifi Cloud and see issues.
  • In Signifi Cloud, under "Wi-Fi Adapter", you'll see the name of the interface (such as "en0"), instead of the name of the Wi-Fi adapter. In the future, we'll probably always say, "Apple AirPort Adapter" or similar when uploading scans from Signifi Agent. We'll also add a lot more details about the client device.
  • On non-Retina displays, the Download and Upload Usage Graphs don't draw properly. Although they're fine on Retina displays, we plan to get this fixed.
  • Once you click "Add a Room", there's no way to go back. Add a room - or else! We'll get a back button added in the next release.
  • On macOS 10.14 Mojave, none of the icons in the "Stats View" (the front page of the application) don't populate. Instead, you'll only get their light-colored backgrounds. Let us know if you see this issue, and what version of macOS you are running.