Is it entertainment? Is it a utility? Nobody knows! Unpopular in its home country of the United Kingdom (well, not many copies are downloaded here anyway), USBleat is proving surprisingly popular in Japan and Holland. Surprising because it hasn't been localised into Dutch or Japanese. Maybe the Japanese and the Dutch have better senses of humour than the English - or perhaps they just haven't worked out what it does yet. Baahhh!

I think that USBleat is a utility that is both useful and fun. It has two main functions:

• To alert the user when a USB device is connected or disconnected. In the basic version of USBleat these notifications are farmyard noises.

• USBleat can also conveniently provide information about connected USB devices. The free version of USBleat will only provide information on one device at a time and it will forget a device as soon as it is disconnected (this means that it's information window will disappear when a device is disconnected).

A future version of USBleat, USBleat Pro can be configured by adding plugins - and these plugins allow virtually limitless notification options. The name of the device could be spoken, for example, or custom alert sounds recorded. Since 3rd parties can develop plugins for USBleat Pro, perhaps the notification will take a form that I haven't imagined. USBleat Pro can have as many USB information windows open at any time as you like - which is handy for comparing two devices side by side. In addition, you can set USBleat Pro to remember disconnected devices so that their information windows remain open even after a device is disconnected.

Please Note USBleat requires Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or above for full functionality. If you're using Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then you will find that some functionality is missing.