Contrac

Contrac monitors your Internet Service Provider and generates a log of down time.

This tracker pings Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to determine connectivity.

This windows app is a single file .exe, with embedded resources, tray notification, and window minimization to the tray.

Installation

Copy the latest release of the exe to your computer from here

https://github.com/johnshew/contrac/releases

Since Contrac automatically writes to the log files every 5 minutes it is good to put the exe in the directory you want the logs to go.

Notes

This was an interesting first project to learn Rust. Thanks to Gabriel Dube for creating native-windows-gui, a nice toolkit for small native Win32 apps.

The graph rendering in Contrac is a hack. Since there are currently no easy-to-use drawing capabilties with native-windows-gui, Contrac uses a collection of small image controls to represent the bars of the graph.

On Windows, by default, Rust starts a console. If you want a Windows app put the following at the top of main.rs.

#![windows_subsystem = "windows"]

Here a few things that I thought about PRing into native-windows-gui:

• Minimize and restore windows
• Maybe enable WS_CLIPSIBLINGS in flags for controls and enable z-ordering
• Provide more access to the nwg::win32 helper functions

Recommended Visual Studio Extensions

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rust-lang.rust
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vadimcn.vscode-lldb