Make a comparison just of the websites. Whisher’s mapping system is a disaster, however WeFi’s really does work.

Whisher was and still is all mouth no action, just look at how the CEO and CTO behave, making deliberate and abusive comments at another wireless sharing companies director and his product, I can only assume to attempt to gain more (bad) publicity for their poor quality and pathetic attempt at entering the market.

All that FON was Ferrans idea, and he had business cards …. Mike and his FON are liars mapping exploits. Please, guys, acknowledge that you only make yourselves look like the true amateurs you are.

Wefi, is a far more logical and professionally developed (in all aspects, be it the actual application or their website) product. It would also seem that their management and developers have more skills than the (chuckle) competition. I look forward to watching WeFi flourish, well done, you certainly have not made the mistakes that your (still chuckling) competition made.

Fred

The best in my opinion is Easy WiFi Radar (freeware) from Makayama.

Their PRO-version also has a mapping tool and will show you free hotspots on a map.

I travel a lot to densely populated cities and I live in one (Amsterdam). What’s it like to be sitting somewhere confronted by 8-10 wireless networks, several of which are open/free? I’d like to have my device just find the best one and log me in. I do not want to spend time trying to find the best connection when I’ve got 15 minutes before a meeting and I have to catch a ride in the overflowing subway systems that most cities have. In London, sadly, there are always delays of one sort of another in the Tube. That’s what Wefi and its competitors are trying to do. Conferences are another place where there are lots of networks and I’d like my computer to just log me onto the best one.

Anyway, if one day you’d experience something similar : F8, safe mode boot (WITHOUT) network drivers is your friend. And if even then you cn’t deinstall, just delete all the program files you can find (usually program folder is enough) and a decent Windows Registry software tool (I tend to advice Tune Up Utilities - don’t shoot me I know there are thousands, but TUU has always been one of the more reliable ones IMHO) will do the rest: remove registry entries, detect a broken driver (or discover that a driver has been installed incorrectly) and much more.
After that there should be no trace of the install anymore. ;-)

Actually all this can be done from Windows too, but that would be a little harder to find out. ;-)

I use both Mac and XP/Vista combinations and I’ve never had any problems. Sure, maybe once or twice I may have to go through a couple of trial and errors to find the best connection, but I don’t think it warrants an application.

Does anybody else feel the same way?

1. Since the first release of Whisher, we provided a rating system for hotspots, with which users could give 1 to 5 stars based on their subjective experience with the connection. Additionally, we keep a running average of signal strength and availability as reported by other users automatically. The average signal strength helps you relocate if your current signal is lower than the average one found by other users. The availability shows how many times other users were able to successfully connect, or failed to do so. Based on these parameters, you can make a much better decision as to where to connect.

2. Automatically connecting to the nearest open WiFi based on a set of arbitrary parameters is not legal. Whisher will not connect you automatically to the nearest open signal, only to those which have been tagged or actively shared by others. Of course a user could connect to an unknown open WiFi signal and tag it, but it is up to him to make that decision, not the software. Whether WeFi does this or not could probably do with some clarification.

3. We take great care in testing and QA to be as sure as possible that problems such as those described by Yezdi do not happen. We offer support through our forums and email to those users who get into difficulties.

Other than this, I wish the WeFi crew good luck, having no competition is usually bad news :)

Mike (CTO, Whisher)

I think the reason I also had such a strong adverse reaction is that I can just imagine someone like my father or my non technical friends downloading and installing this - if any of them have the same problem I had, they are toast. Most users on Windows are not familiar with the network stack and/or System Restore were this to happen.

My suggestion to the WeFi team is focus on all the worst case consumer scenarios and provide REALLY EASY WAYS to fix them both as a prominent uninistall link on the desktop/ start menu and on the support FAQ off your website first before asking users to do this. If even 5-10% of users have the same issue I did, that is awful PR for a young company. Having done a prior startup (acquired by MSFT), perception is critical to new product adoption.

Writing a good filter driver in C++ is actually hard and memory issues may bring the OS crashing down - in a lot of cases what may also cause this is the AntiVirus software on the box.

All I request is make sure users have a simple trauma-free way to back off this change if it goes south on their machines. Esp, as it is likely that their laptop is their only PC / internet access device.

Thanks for your insights. I have to say, I didn’t uninstall the software before writing the post. That I admit is my fault, and am sorry for putting you through some serious misery. If there is anything I learnt from this - in the future uninstall before writing a post. I am genuinely feeling horrible for ruining your day.

Just to share your pain, I went and uninstall ed the software, using the control panel, and rebooted the computer. The WeFi seems to be gone from my windows xp laptop. Not sure if I did anything special or not, (and can’t really tell if there is the software hidden somewhere) but it is not in the menus, and in the installed applications list.

If there is anyone else having similar issues, let me know. I don’t want to put anyone through the same ordeal Yezdi had to go through.

Since reading the original post this morning I fumbled about and found TastyApps’ application called “wi-find”, which sits neatly in my AIrport dropdown menu alerting me not only to the strengths of wireless networks, but indicates which are open and which are not (encrypted).

So much education in less than 24 hours, who says the Internet isn’t a place to learn.