Viscosity for Mac

Elegant OpenVPN client

There's not much you can do to make a VPN more attractive to use but the makers of Viscosity have given it a very good go.

Viscosity is an OpenVPN client for Mac which gives a rich Cocoa graphical user interface for creating, editing, and controlling VPN connections. Viscosity is very much aimed at VPN novices. It allows connections to be completely configured through a GUI, without any need to know how to use the command-line or OpenVPN's configuration file syntax.

Viscosity does a nice job of monitoring your OpenVPN connections to ensure you know what's going on at all times and the floating 'Details' window keeps you up to date with IP addresses, traffic flow, and OpenVPN messages. Thanks to support for Growl as well, Viscosity keeps you notified about your VPN connection including alerts when the status of a VPN connection changes, IP address changes etc. It also works with keychain to protect your privacy at all times.

However, the big drawback of Viscosity is that it only supports the Open VPN protocol which means no Cisco support. Cisco VPN users are therefore excluded from using it.

Overall though, Viscosity is a superbly-presented OpenVPN client that makes managing and setting up VPN connections an absolute breeze.

Changes

Fixed regression resulting in DHCP being activated late for some TAP interfaces The Details window no longer triggers graphics card switching on modern MacBook Pros Viscosity now allows the computer to go to sleep considerably faster