Simon Express 3.2.1

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks websites and servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via sound, speech, or other means. You can use it to track updated sites, and to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers.

Simon is very versatile. It can be used to monitor your own website and servers, track posts and new comments on your or friends` blogs, check for web mail, get notifications of updates to favorite news and entertainment websites, keep an eye on auctions, and many other uses.

MONITOR YOUR SITES AND SERVERS

Central to Simon is the Monitor window. It enables you to see at a glance the current status of all of your monitored websites and servers. In addition to a colorful status icon and up-time percentage, the tests table displays how long ago the last change and failure occurred, and when the next check will occur. But that`s not all. This window also displays further statistics about the tests, and tables listing recent checks (including the check duration and a bar chart), changes (including the text that changed), failures (including the error description), and activity, including when tests start checking, and the various steps during the check (starting, stopping, service result, each filter, notifications, etc), plus other actions on tests, e.g. editing, pausing, etc.

AT YOUR SERVICE

A number of services come built-in. Services tell Simon how to check a test. They include:

* DNS: Query a domain name server to ensure the domain is visible.
* FTP: Look at a file on an FTP server, to detect its availability or changes.
* Ping: Ping any server to check responsiveness; you can specify timeout and packet loss limits.
* Web (HTTP): Check a website for changes or failures.

PUT A DETECTIVE ON THE JOB

But what about websites that have banners or other irrelevant content? Won`t that confuse Simon into thinking the page has changed? Nope! Simon has a very useful feature called Filters, where you can tell it what part of the page to look for, e.g. a comment count on a blog, or the lead headline area on a news site.

* Block: Look for two pieces of text in the filter input, and output the text between them, if found. Also detects if a change occurred from the previous time it was checked. Advanced options include the ability to look for a specific occurrence of the markers.
* Block Without Changes: Similar to the Block filter, but doesn`t detect changes; useful as a filter before others.
Change: Simply detect a change anywhere in the input text.
* Change: Simply detects any change in the input text.
* Simple Format: The Format filters can reformat the output text, including using variables, for example to combine the output of two filters, or wrap in quotes.

COMMUNICATION IS THE BEST POLICY

Okay, so Simon monitors your tests, detecting changes, failures, and recoveries. And it displays this information in the Monitor window, Dock icon, and Status menu. But you`re a busy person, and sometimes want important events to really catch your attention. You`re in luck: Simon also has a notifiers feature, with several ways of telling you about things you want to know. Each test can use any number of notifiers, with separate notifiers for each type of event. So, for example, you could speak some text and go to the web page when your favorite blog changes, but play a loud buzzer when it goes down.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Simon Express enables an unlimited number of tests, via the most popular services, filters and notifiers. Simon Free is also available, at no cost, for people who only need to monitor their own or a few websites: it is the same as Simon Express, but is limited to 5 active test configurations.

Visit the Dejal website for support and more information, including another edition of Simon that includes more services, filters, notifiers, plus reports features, and the ability to customize all of them.