Flame. Cast light on your network.

If you've ever wondered what's going on behind the scenes on your network, then Flame can show you.

Bonjour has been described as "no-pain networking". If you've ever used iTunes and seen shared libraries popping up without having to configure anything, then you'll know that it really is painless. That's not to say that it's perfect. If you see someone's sharing their music, how do you see if they're also sharing photos with iPhoto?

Just start Flame to see all the computers on the network that are advertising services. (If it can, it'll identify the user of each computer instead of giving you the machine's name.) Disclose the services available from each. You can even delve right into the service record to see the gory details, if you like that sort of thing.

Unlike existing browsers, which group by service, Flame groups by the machine they're on. This means that you can see the links between services; "Tom's Music" is being shared by the iChat user "Tom", who also has an iPhoto library, "My Holiday Snaps", and a web server. No need to wonder who's doing what any more.

Flame's still a little immature, but we think it's useful, so here's an archive containing the application, and the obligatory screenshot. Now Universal, for Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers

Flame: developed by Tom Insam and Paul Mison using the PyObjC bindings. Icon by Dario Villanueva.

Flame is also now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch via the App Store.