If you regularly move your laptop from one place to another, you are going to love this app. John C Welch 
, never one to pass on a colourful phrase, says “Dude, this is the shit! I’m…I think I’m in love! Seriously, you just made a lot of people really happy.”
I am one of them. NetworkLocation is a smart network location-switcher. It not only senses automatically whether you are at work or home and switches you Mac’s accordingly, it offers a shedload of other location-specific actions.
For example, every morning when I arrive at work, it not only automatically switches to my work location, it sets my work network printer as the default, turns off Airport, swaps in work’s SMTP server, mounts my network share, and sets my iChat status to away (it is _work_ after all).
When I get home, everything is reversed, and Tunnelblick , a VPN client, is launched so that I can get at my work files from home.
The developers, Centrix.ca, provide a full listing of all the tricks that NetworkLocation can perform:
It can be set to switch locations automatically. Otherwise, when it senses a change in the network environment, it pops up a nice smoked glass Chooser (other skins are included):
The app’s Preferences provide options to adding specific actions to particular locations, skinning the interface and more:
The company has also created a SDK for other developers to create their own plugins. Heck, there is even one for Entourage!
Certainly, this is the cat’s pyjamas.
NetworkLocation is shareware (USD 25) and available from the developers’ web site .
I’ve been using Marco Polo for this for a while now. It works great, actively developed, open source and while free, donations are welcome.
Marco Polo is free and works very nicely. I haven’t compared the 2 programs by feature, but they are very similar.
Interesting. Never heard of it before. I’ll try it out when the current list of Leopard problems – which would make it unusable for me – are fixed:
http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo/trac/trac.cgi/report/11
MarcoPolo is mainly developed by an Aussie, too! I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it, Tim!
That current list of Leopard problems consists almost entirely of closed tickets – there are 2 still open – firewall tweaking and bluetooth evidence source (which is nasty if you use bluetooth for this).
I have also been using MarcoPolo for some time and find it excellent. I tried NetworkLocation and found I prefered MacoPolo. I love the location sensing in Marcopolo.