AllPeers Roadmap - Part One
I had assumed that after releasing our first public beta, I’d be able to retire and move to my own private island in the South Pacific. Then I read somewhere on the web that people are expecting us to continue working on AllPeers, fixing issues and adding features. So it seems I’ll have to wait a bit longer to concentrate full-time on honing my golf skills.
But seriously. We’ve got enough plans for AllPeers to keep us busy for years, and I wanted to give some more information about what we’ve got cooking. I’m planning three posts on this topic covering immediate, short-term and long-term plans.
By far the most common feedback we’ve got on AllPeers v0.50 (i.e. the first public beta) is that the idea is awesome, the product shows great promise but the implementation is not quite ready for prime time. We absolutely agree with this assessment, and the comments we’ve received since our public debut are invaluable to us in determining priorities and moving the project forward. Thanks to everyone who took the time to write to us with their praise, suggestions and criticisms.
Our goal is for AllPeers v0.60 is to resolve all of the most important issues with v0.50 that have been reported to us. These include performance issues, usability concerns and real honest-to-goodness bugs. We’ve identified the issues that we want to address and we’re finalizing a detailed schedule, so I can’t give a firm deadline for this. Ideally I’d like to see this happen over the next couple of months, but I’ll give confirmation of this once we’re done with our planning.
Rather than go for a big bang with v0.60, we’re going to continue to release early and often, pushing out new versions as soon as they are ready so that people can try them out, let us know what they think and benefit from the improvements as quickly as possible. We’re currently planning three intermediate releases: v0.51, v0.52 and v0.53.
I’m using version 0.51 right now. It should be online early next week. New goodies include:
- Work offline
- Hide toolbar link, which causes small toolbar to be displayed in the sidebar
- Much better feedback during registration process
- Option to create a new group in the Add a Contact form
- Various small performance, download and presence improvements
Once we’re done with our detailed scheduling I’ll post information about what we’re planning for the other versions leading up to v0.60. Cancelling downloads is definitely slated for v0.52 and we would like to have our instant messaging client included in v0.60. Please do keep in mind that any and all of this is subject to change. I’ll post here with updates if that happens.
As always, your comments are most welcome.
Update: I just realized that 0.51 also has an option to select the AllPeers download directory.
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It would be nice to get a way to easily do bug-reporting. The only thing I found was a forum that I couldn’t get an account on.
It should much easier
Comment by pascal — 9/8/2006 @ 6:07 pm
Great, a roadmap! At least now we know what exactly we can expect, good job
Comment by Lulu — 9/8/2006 @ 6:08 pm
Please include something simple (not too flashy) like Google Talk as the IM Client
Comment by Sohil — 9/10/2006 @ 7:57 pm
When are we going to be able to share larger Files? On a couple of occasions I have tried to send something and received a message saying file transfers are limited but this will be addressed in a later version. Will that be 0.51?
Regards
Bill Birchall
Comment by William Birchall — 9/11/2006 @ 6:43 pm
The number of files is restricted, not the size. We are going to remove the restriction on sharing directory hierachies as soon as possible, but it will take a while to remove the restriction on number of files since we will probably want to take a whole different approach if people are sharing large numbers of files.
Comment by Matt — 9/12/2006 @ 9:04 am
Would it take long to allow users to select where AllPeers will download the files to? I don’t fancy an AllPeers folder on my desktop (any folder btw) but especially not on shared computers where I use FirefoxPortable with AllPeers.
Comment by Lulu — 9/12/2006 @ 3:01 pm
Actually I just realized that we have this in version 0.51. Forgot to mention that. So it’ll be available in a couple of days.
Comment by Matt — 9/12/2006 @ 3:09 pm
It would really be great to be able to log in as a different user. Even uninstalling the extension and re-installing it, it immediately re-uses the same username as before. I installed it on 2 computers using the same username, which created some weird problems, so I want a different name on each machine. How can I pull that off? Any files I can delete?
Comment by george — 9/12/2006 @ 3:57 pm
Good point. I just filed a bug for this. In the meantime, you can delete the allpeers subdirectory inside your Firefox profile directory by hand. If you then restart Firefox, you’ll be prompted to register again.
Comment by Matt — 9/12/2006 @ 4:27 pm
Hello
Will you add capability to have several allpeers installationq on a home network behing a router ? And by when, if that’s already planned ?
Thanks
Comment by Zatar — 9/12/2006 @ 4:54 pm
Unless I am misunderstanding, we already do this. What is preventing you from doing this today?
Comment by Matt — 9/12/2006 @ 5:44 pm
I believe that AllPeers has a great future. With the first release installed in Bon Echo Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060912 BonEcho/2.0b2 ID:2006091203, if enabled as an extention,the search engines disappear. Now this is probably already been discussed. However, if not, I thought I would bring it to the authors attention.
Comment by Wayne Alligood — 9/13/2006 @ 1:51 am
This product really blows… its overhyped. Sorry!
Comment by Simon — 9/13/2006 @ 1:51 am
Wayne - we don’t support Bon Echo yet. I’m a little surprised that it even installs since the extension should know which versions of Firefox it is compatible with.
Comment by Matt — 9/13/2006 @ 8:57 am
To Matt : About the router, you are right, the transfer can also be done using outbound port 443 only. But my question was (implicitely
rather about Port Forwarding on inbound port 36000 to speed up the transfer !
Thanks
Comment by Zatar — 9/13/2006 @ 2:17 pm
And to be more precise, will we be able to select the listening port (currently 36000) to do port forwarding to various PCs on my home network ?
Thanks
Comment by Zatar — 9/13/2006 @ 2:41 pm
Good point, I filed an enhancement request with our network developers.
Comment by Matt — 9/13/2006 @ 3:07 pm
[…] The AllPeers Road map was released over the last week or so. I have not covered it as it was a projected pace and changes to match. But it appears that they have come good and just released AllPeers v0.51. The key features that they claim to have added and addressed are: […]
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