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A narrower item that stops changing shape
Twenty-four points came off the figures, and the reading now looks the same
whatever it says.
The scale can step down to bytes. Its floor was kilobytes, which made an
idle link read 0 KB/s — a quiet lie, since something is nearly always
trickling — and forced a fourth column on the figure to cover the range the
unit could not reach. Free to step, the figure always lands between 1 and 999,
and three columns hold it: 412 B/s, 51.7 KB/s, 114.4 MB/s.
Nothing moving holds the scale where the traffic left it. Allowed to step,
a pause in a megabyte download walked the unit down to 0.0 B/s inside three
ticks — a reading in a unit with nothing to do with what was happening a second
earlier. Only an exact zero holds it; a trickle still steps it down, so a real
change of régime is never masked.
The tenth is always there, a size down. It used to come and go — present
below ten, absent above it, absent again at zero — so the figure changed shape
as well as value, and the eye re-read it every time. It keeps the figures' own
baseline, unlike the unit, because it is part of the number rather than a note
about it.
What that took, for anyone who follows
The suffix is padded to the width of the longest: B/s is a character shorter
than KB/s, and without it the item jumped a character wide whenever the scale
crossed a kilobyte — which, on an idle link, is constantly. The padding space
has to be set in the unit's smaller size, or it puts the width straight back.
And the space touching the unit is tightened exactly once: applied to each of
them, the pair before B/s pulled a kern further than the single one before
KB/s, and the width drifted again.
Universal build — Apple silicon and Intel in one image.
Gatekeeper will not open an unsigned app from the internet on the first try:
drag NetSpeed to Applications, then right-click it and choose Open.