Beta Days

Monday July 24th 2006, 8:30 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:AllPeers
Posted By: Matt

So, time for another beta update. It’s true: we expected to have the public beta out earlier this month and we’re late. Nonetheless, we’re really close. The main remaining tasks are getting our data center up to snuff (we do have some centralized elements, after all) in preparation from the (hopefully) upcoming onslaught, fixing some lingering bugs and performance tuning. Because of the fact that we’ve been in the public eye a bit more than expected, we’ve certainly taken more time with this release than we otherwise would have. There just didn’t seem any point in releasing anything until we’d taken into account some of the more pointed feedback from our private beta testers. I sincerely hope that the result will be a public beta that is more complete, more stable and easier to use than most. But we’ll let you be the judge of that.

We’re currently putting the finishing touches on our next private beta (version 0.36), which will be online in the next couple of days. This is more or less the version that will turn into the public beta. It has loads of cool new stuff:

  • System tray icon (yay!)
  • Use of BitTorrent when sharing files with multiple contacts
  • Drag ’n’ share for text selections
  • Drag ’n’ share for web images
  • Grippy in share form to change size of message box
  • Remove individual items from thumbnail panel in share form
  • Share text from the clipboard
  • New tab opened when “New in AllPeers” is clicked
  • Thumbnails have a progress bar when downloading
  • Download progress is visible in tab bar
  • Much better user feedback when downloading
  • Drag ’n’ share onto entire group

This is additional to numerous bug fixes and minor improvements. As you can see, we haven’t been slacking over the past couple of weeks.

We plan to have one final private beta, hopefully next week, focused mainly on performance improvements. We also plan to include support for external (i.e. non-AllPeers) torrents. I want to stress that we do plan to invite each and every one of our private beta testers before we put the public beta online. Once we’ve done that and assuming there aren’t any blocking issues, we’ll be good to go. Stay tuned!

Update: The new release is now online for all platforms except for Mac (we’re working on getting universal binaries built so that Intel Mac owners can run AllPeers too). We’ll be inviting more testers starting tomorrow.


27 Comments »

  1. It’s good to see that progress is being made, he says, tapping his fingers and waiting anxiously. :-)

    Good idea to take the time and get it right.

    Comment by B.D. — 7/24/2006 @ 9:14 pm

  2. This is good news, Matt, I am really looking forward to it.

    One of the biggest problems I used other P2P sharing is NAT issue, especially home router etc. Is this something you already had good handle on it?

    Comment by Rhian — 7/24/2006 @ 9:47 pm

  3. Good job guys. Keep up the good work!

    Comment by Corey Farwell — 7/25/2006 @ 2:20 am

  4. hooray!

    Comment by ian — 7/25/2006 @ 7:03 am

  5. So you are quite good at philandering , nways, we are waiting……………..:-)

    Comment by Jonathan — 7/25/2006 @ 1:43 pm

  6. Philandering? Heh, I wish… ;-)

    Comment by Matt — 7/25/2006 @ 1:49 pm

  7. Rhian - yes, our support for people using NATs is already quite good, and we have a number of major improvements already lined up.

    Comment by Matt — 7/25/2006 @ 1:50 pm

  8. Aaah!
    stopped waiting a long time back
    just dropped by to see wats happening and theres this same post asking for people to wait more

    as much as i love to use your project, as much as i love you guys for creating some like this open-source, as much as i would be more than happy to help u guys in any form, i am also kind of sick reading lines like ‘we’re working HARD, wait for more, coming soon’

    thank u
    and sorry if i was non-considerate and harsh. i was just being honest

    Comment by Aah — 7/26/2006 @ 9:16 am

  9. I heard about allpeers in january. I signed up for the beta test in february, expecting to get the beta right then and there, and was ‘told to wait a few days for the beta invite’. A couple of days would’ve been great, especially since by asking me to add my friend’s email addresses so that I could use it made me feel like this was coming soon.
    Since that day, I have been checking my email, and finding nothing. I keep coming to this site and seeing bullshit about a ‘private’ beta that know one i know seems to have been able to use, and promises that the software is coming.
    You recently promised early July.
    Now this bullshit.
    You’re making me look like an idiot, telling family members and friends in february to look out for allpeers. They are all checking their email. And emailing me about it.
    Now I check in and it’s another couple of days.

    I don’t believe allpeers exists. This is a marketing scam.

    Comment by theCurteye — 7/26/2006 @ 10:27 pm

  10. Like above I don’t believe you have anything to put out into beta. The same old any day now, soon and wait.

    You’ve missed the good will that was built and now it’t to late. Allpeers is Vaporware!

    Comment by Coy — 7/27/2006 @ 5:49 am

  11. But no i dont think its vaporware. i believe its gonna be an amazing product which is gonna rock.

    but the way theyve been nagging the whole thing for such a long time is sick.
    i wish other product-makers dont do this kind of a thing with people.

    Comment by Aah — 7/27/2006 @ 8:31 am

  12. I’m running 0.35 and don’t see an update notification in the Extension Manager. Did it get pushed to the right server location?

    Comment by Brian King — 7/27/2006 @ 11:10 am

  13. Yeah, I noticed that problem too. I haven’t had time to confirm this yet, but I’m guessing that the problem is related to our automated update notification, for which we make an explicit get of the update.rdf file from our server. Apparently this is causing it to be cached by Firefox so the new version isn’t even loaded. You can confirm this by going to http://www.allpeers.com/download/windows/update.rdf (assuming you’re on Windows). If you press Shift-Refresh you’ll see the new update.rdf and after that it will find the update.

    We’ll make sure this is fixed in the next release.

    Comment by Matt — 7/27/2006 @ 12:04 pm

  14. I took a look at your release note for this version. Seems nothing changes yet? Especially no NAT traversal which makes me worry.

    Comment by Rhian — 7/27/2006 @ 5:09 pm

  15. Sorry, the known issues page is now updated. NAT traversal will be in the next version.

    Comment by Matt — 7/27/2006 @ 6:05 pm

  16. Matt:

    I suggest you guys need to make NAT work smoothly before public release. I tested Zapr and Pubet, none of them are elegant on NAT, I have to configure router for sharing.

    Comment by Rhian — 7/27/2006 @ 6:23 pm

  17. We have a few strategies for handling NATs in addition to hole punching, but yeah, the plan is definitely to have NAT traversal in the public release. It’s implemented and we’re testing it.

    Comment by Matt — 7/27/2006 @ 6:49 pm

  18. Guys I love the drag and share of images from webpages!

    Thanks for that

    Comment by Fred — 7/28/2006 @ 1:25 am

  19. The update problem is solved.

    Comment by Brian King — 7/28/2006 @ 10:45 am

  20. The new beta version sounds cool with a lot many features. Great work guys! Keep up!!

    Comment by Johnpaul — 7/29/2006 @ 11:12 am

  21. 0.36 is excellent, you guys seem to have really solved a lot of the 0.35 problems, we’re using it regularly at work now! As I constantly switch FF off and on I like the always on icon in the sys tray particularly, keeps my downloads from stopping and starting so much. Thanks, J

    Comment by Julia — 7/30/2006 @ 11:16 pm

  22. I just recently got my invite so 0.36 is the first version that I’m testing.
    It does seem to work ok, but still has a lot of bugs and annoying limitations:
    * For once, if I close Firefox I want it closed. (I hardly ever close it anyways and if I do it usually is for a good reason) So the fact that Allpeers keeps it open and stays in the systray, while it certainly makes sense in some scenarios, should definately be optional. I hope the next version has an options panel where I can change that behaviour. Also, whenever Firefox needs to restart because a security update needs to be applied or an extension or theme was updated Allpeers should let Firefox shut down properly or at least offer this as an option when the last Firefox-Window is closed.
    * Trying to share a folder with only 55 wallpapers made my Firefox use 100% CPU for almost 5 minutes on my Athlon 64 3600+ with 1GB RAM and Windows MCE 2005. And of course I couldn’t do anything else with Firefox during this time.
    * If a shared folder or file is moved it seems to confuse the hell out of the allpeers extension. I was unable to start Firefox until I restored the original position of the folder that I moved, Firefox would just freeze with 100% cpu on startup.
    * I really don’t like toolbar cluttering. The one “allpeers” button is perfectly fine, it should not only toggle the sidebar but also the additional toolbar. It also would make much more sense to integrate the buttons into the sidebar instead of an additional toolbar. Then only one button would be added to the normal, uncluttered Firefox interface. “Allpeers Home”, “Share” and “Transfers” can go on top of the left sidebar, the less frequently used “Add a contact” and “Support” can go on the bottom for example.
    * The “Customize” feature is broken for both, the allpeers toolbar and the allpeers button. I can’t change the position of either one in Firefox 1.5.0.5
    * Trying to remove multiple shared files does not collect them in one right sidebar (like the user interfaces suggests) but opens multiple right sidebars on top of each other.

    Comment by Christoph — 7/31/2006 @ 1:12 pm

  23. Thanks for your comments, Christoph. Most of these are common requests and we’re working on them. The only really serious point is the CPU load when sharing large numbers of files. I’m looking at that right now.

    Comment by Matt — 7/31/2006 @ 4:49 pm

  24. okay - sorry to reiterate some points that have already been made… but this any day now crap is getting old… especially since I thought this was truly revolutionary stuff… however, I stumbled across www.qnext.com and did some homework– these guys pioneered private p2p and do a whoole lot more. allpeers will be big, maybe in 2010, here’s something neat in the interim

    Comment by Mike — 7/31/2006 @ 7:22 pm

  25. @Mike
    Thank you for this qnext link.I think it offers everything allpeers offers except bittorrent support.

    Also qnext has many other interesting features too.Cant wait to try it.

    Comment by Aseem Behl — 8/1/2006 @ 5:39 am

  26. I use Qnext and like it very much. It is the best product for Instant Messaging, Video Conferencing, Photo Sharing, Music Streaming and Online Gaming. You can download this free product from Qnext Web Site (http://www.qnext.com/).

    Comment by Paul — 9/14/2006 @ 10:02 am

  27. New Release of Qnext version 3
    I want to present my favourite software Qnext. I have tried many programs but when I found out Qnext, I adore it. Attractive user interface, gathering many services all in one product, that are absolutely free for all Qnext users. Qnext comprises Music Streaming, Photo Sharing, File sharing, Universal Messenger (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ), Group Text Chat and Tagboard, File Transfer, Online Gaming, Video Conferencing, Audio Conferencing and IRC. Qnext is one exciting product, including new vision: new Peer to Peer and Peer to Web services, attractive user interface and Webcasts. Qnext gives the chance to share media resources directly from your computer.
    Using Webcasts you can send Web URL to all your friends, to watch, download, and listen to your PC media in their Web browsers. Qnext is one multi platform product, available for MAC OSX, Windows and Linux. Free download Qnext (http://qnext.com/) and you will have free access to all-in-one broadcast and communications services.

    Comment by Tim — 3/8/2007 @ 5:35 pm

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