If you've played games online you may have suffered from lags and kicks. Hasten (http://www.nspira.com/hasten) is a new, US$5.99 status bar app for Mac OS X designed to reduce your latency to remote servers.

This helps to reduce your lag when playing online games and improve your performance by providing a smoother connection to the server. Hasten does this by optimizing your network performance to send vital data more quickly to the remote server, according to the app developers at Nspira.

"One of the main causes of lag when playing online, is the result of the server waiting for data from your computer," they say. "Delays can be caused by congestion on the internet. If there is a delay in the server receiving data, its causes lag. Hasten helps to prevent this congestion by changing how your Mac transfers data over the Internet."