Unlike other tools, Little Snitch does not have a standard interface that you have to work in and it does not take any space in your Dock. After a very simple installation, Little Snitch will be available in Applications > System Preferences ready to be used at once.

It was the logical place to put this application since it hooks right into the OS kernel while you are logged in and monitors what’s happening until you decide it should stop.

Every time an application tries to establish a network connection, Little Snitch pauses it and tells you about it in the form of an alert panel.

The panel contains all the connection details and then it’s up to you to decide if you’re going to allow it or not.

Since many of us use a variety of software that needs to make network connections it would be a pain to click every time you want to allow your e-mail client to check for new messages or your RSS reader to find out what’s been happening with your favorite websites. This is why at the moment of a connection alert, Little Snitch allows you to create a permanent rule for similar future connections where you can permanently allow of deny future connections. In order to customize your work experience completely you can also manually add your own rules to Little Snitch.

This handy tools is a good complement to your firewall. While the firewall covers outside attacks, Little Snitch gives you all the information about what originates from your machine. If you want full control over your Mac OS X environment than this is definitely a program that will get you there.

For more information on Little Snitch and a demo download, visit the Objective Development website.