From what I've found, BrickHouse is the best GUI application for accessing the built-in firewall ipfw. As such it is good for people who want more features than the simple preference pane, but don't want to work in the CLI. It is now up to 1.3 and has come far, but it still needs work to warrant a full five star recommendation and the requested cost. (I paid anyway.) Some problems that still exist are:

0. The author is unresponsive to emailed queries after two weeks.

1. When creating rules (filters), you cannot simultaneously create a rule to apply to both built-in Ethernet (en0) and wireless Ethernet (en1). The interface forces you to create a rule for one interface, then for the other. If you have a handcrafted custom ruleset that takes time to build, this will double your time. There should be an option in the GUI to apply rules to both (all) interfaces.

2. No matter the order in which you create custom rules, BrickHouse enters them in random order. You can drag and drop them into your preferred order, but this is extremely tedious and time consuming. An option to reorder the rules by port number (a standard method for configuring rules in the CLI) would be a big time saver instead of the current big time waster.

3. Editing rules by hand (either in the CLI or in BBEdit) and then reviewing them in BrickHouse causes the app to crash.

4. No longer works in 10.2.

5. Payment of the shareware fee does not seem to prompt any reply to queries about problems or suggestions for improvement.