The Cloak VPN app for Mac is my favourite VPN client in the Mac World. The pricing is ok, it’s very easy to setup, it just works and it’s available for Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone and iPad) all at once.
The world is changing to ever more mobility and people are used to have internet available everywhere – even free WiFi is quite normal these days. Since those WiFis should not be trusted one needs a simple way to encrypt all traffic and hide it from prying eyes on the local network.
You have to sign up for the service at https://www.getcloak.com/ and install the app on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. If you are not sure if you want to pay for a VPN service, there is a 30-day free trial available, so you can check this out for yourself. Once the app is installed, you sign in to your account and everything is ready to go.
The Mac App
After you have installed the app (as of this writing version 1.2.3) on your Mac, you get an icon in the menu bar where you can modify the preferences of Cloak.
Options to consider
In general there is not much to do to setup Cloak but a few options should be verified. On the network preferences make sure you exclude necessary networks like your home or office networks. Moreover you probably want to check “Automatically enable Cloak on untrusted networks” and “Activate OverCloak on untrusted networks”.
While the first option is there only to not forget to enable Cloak, the second is quite important. “OverCloak” makes sure, your Mac does not send any data before the VPN connection is fully established and ready to encrypt your traffic. More details about “OverCloak” can found in the article All About OverCloak.
If you want to connect to a certain country, you can select this in the transporter pane. At the moment the following countries are available: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States.
On the accounts pane you can see how much of the data in your plan you already have used. It should be clear that your plan must match your usage of the service.