AllPeers Roadmap - Part Two
AllPeers v0.51 is now in the queue at the Mozilla addon site, waiting to go online. It should be available today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s the next in our three part series on the continuing evolution of AllPeers: the road to v0.60.
The next AllPeers version, planned for release this month, is v0.52. Highlights of this version include:
- Pause, resume, cancel downloads
- Queued files remain in queue when Firefox is restarted
- Registration screen is displayed just once
- Preliminary NAT traversal implementation
- Less obtrusive tray icon
- Peers can’t share with you until you approve them
- Deleting happens in the background without blocking Firefox
- Improvements to registration and restore account processes
- Many bugfixes and improvements to user interface, presence and downloading
These are just the highlights. There will be a lot of important improvements under the hood as well.
We still haven’t nailed down all the details for the v0.53 and v0.60 versions, but you can expect to see at least most of the following:
- Instant messaging
- Better handling of extended Unicode characters in filenames
- Localized versions for languages other than English
- Sharing folder hierarchies
- Upload page (to see what people are downloading from you)
- Faster load time for Firefox
- Click on peer to see both what they shared and what you shared with them
- More intuitive display of messages that have been shared by and with you
- Bandwidth meters and throttle
- Reduced CPU usage
- Multiselect of files in album view
- Many minor improvements…
We’ll let you know what the release date targets are for these versions when we’re done with our planning.
In the final instalment of this series, I’ll post more details about our longer term plans.
UPDATE: Version 0.51 is still waiting in the queue on the Mozilla addon site. I know they’re really busy, but I guess it’ll be online on Monday. We’ll let you know if we hear differently.
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Looks promising. I’ll stay tuned.
Comment by ZenBug — 9/16/2006 @ 8:49 pm
It’s not on Firefox Addons yet.
Comment by Dylan Taylor — 9/17/2006 @ 7:56 pm
Thank You! Sounds like you have covered all the major concerns that I’ve heard others talk about & had figured out for myself! (Bit slow me!)
Anyway, great idea-work-effort and major Thank You!
Comment by waiting2share — 9/18/2006 @ 10:41 am
I think you people should get rid of the tray icon. i really found it as a useless feature of this addon. I just hate this feature. more over you people should remove the icon on the upper right hand side of the browser. till then i am not gonna use all peers. please take notice of my comment.
Comment by jasbir — 9/19/2006 @ 11:20 am
By the way, dont forget compatibility with Firefox 2.0 in your roadmap !
Thanks
Comment by Zatar — 9/19/2006 @ 11:49 am
Jasbir - as far as the toolbar button is concerned, in the new version you can move it or remove it using Toolbars/Customize. So I think that concern has already been addressed.
Regarding the system tray icon: what bugs you? Is it the icon in itself, or the fact that Firefox closes to the system tray (instead of exiting completely)? The latter can already be turned off in AllPeers/Preferences. We are planning to make the icon less obtrusive, easier to turn off, etc., but I would like to understand better what bothers people about it (for those who don’t like it).
Comment by Matt — 9/19/2006 @ 11:52 am
after updating firefox cannot close allpeers because clicking with right button does not give me any choice…just grey…
i tried to uninstall and install a new version… nothing better. any problem with firefox 1.5.0.7 ?
Comment by py — 9/19/2006 @ 12:44 pm
Yeah, it’s a bug caused by the upgrade to FF 1.5.0.7. We’re working on it.
Comment by Matt — 9/19/2006 @ 4:00 pm
Matt, the tray icon bugs me because I don’t really need it. I have FF close completely when I close it. FF is open almost all the time on my computer anyway. I can’t see what’s in the menu because of the bug, but I’m pretty sure I don’t need it. I’d like to see the option to turn it off while it’s not minimized to the tray. A manual “send to tray” option might be good too.
Comment by Jay — 9/21/2006 @ 5:43 am
Okay, in v0.52 the tray icon will only be displayed when FF is closed to the tray, and the close to tray feature will be turned off by default (with an option to turn it on in AllPeers/Preferences). The blank menu bug is also fixed. I do think that the icon will be more useful when we have additional features like drag-n-share to the tray icon (so you can drag-n-share even if the FF window is not in the foreground), display of notifications (e.g. you have new stuff in AllPeers), etc. So when we add these we’ll revisit the issue and maybe make the icon more prominent (or have an option to do so).
I discussed this with someone at Mozilla, and I think the Right Solution will be to have AllPeers running in its own process with Firefox serving as the user interface. In this way, you could close FF completely and leave AllPeers running so that your shares are still available. Unfortunately this won’t be possible until FF 3.0 (for technical reasons that I should probably explain in a blog post), at the earliest, but at least we have something to look forward to.
Comment by Matt — 9/21/2006 @ 1:49 pm
I’m rather concerned to see a lack of update for FF 2.0 although with the extensions compatibility check disabled the current version seems to be fine.
Comment by David — 10/10/2006 @ 2:33 am
please put a progress bar in transfers, either a byte count, or a transfer rate, or something. It is annoying to try to figure out if the transfers are moving or not.
Also, transfers should show up and download at the same time from the same screen
Comment by smaster — 10/11/2006 @ 9:32 pm
For instant messaging, I want something simple like Google Talk. You guys should consider incorporating GTalk as it uses Jabber Protocol.
Comment by Sohil — 10/15/2006 @ 10:40 pm
I discussed this with someone at Mozilla, and I think the Right Solution will be to have AllPeers running in its own process with Firefox serving as the user interface. In this way, you could close FF completely and leave AllPeers running so that your shares are still available. Unfortunately this won’t be possible until FF 3.0 (for technical reasons that I should probably explain in a blog post), at the earliest, but at least we have something to look forward to.
Comment by ttnet — 3/8/2008 @ 11:35 am