BETA RELEASE 1 HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF BETA RELEASE 2.  PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION.

Finally, we reached public beta.  This is our first public release and we worked really hard and spent many late nights to get this release out the door.  We hope that users find this release of Civil Netizen useful for those everyday file transfer tasks.  Many thanks to our friends and family who helped take much earlier versions of our software out for a walk around the Internet.  We know the software isn't complete, and we're still missing some obvious features, but keep an eye out for newer versions as we continue to improve.

1. What’s new in this release:

• Full support for both Internet and LAN/Intranet transfers.
• Integrated Windows Installer
• User notification of possible firewall restrictions

1.1 This release of Civil Netizen introduces updates to the windows look and feel theme of the application.

1.2 This release of Civil Netizen also fixes a number of application stability issues:

• Case 65 : Netizen Crashes when cancelling during packaging
• Case 5 : When dragging a file into the send parcel interface, the entire app crashes
• Case 60 : Cancelling a large parcel extraction operation hangs the UI
• Case 97 : Files that do not have the archive bit set crash Netizen
• Case 106 : Sender identification latency times out parcel pickup requests
• Case  96 : App crashing after being kept on overnight
• Case 109 : App crashing on unstable wireless networks
• Case 116 : Pickup from open internet virtual machine fails
  

1.3 This release of Civil Netizen also corrects a number of UI flaws

• Case 47 : Parcel content tree does not use human scale units like KB or MB for file size
• Case 74 : Cleanup email pickup slip instruction text
• Case 10 : Add "behind firewall" alert notification
• Case 110 : Windows installer should not place a shortcut on the quick launch bar
• Case 119 : Do not capitalize "on" in the parcel info box
  

1.2 This release of Civil Netizen includes support for:

• Packaging files and folders as parcel archives (.parc). It also creates pickup slip files to allows parcel recipients to download the parcel directly from the sender’s computer.
• Downloading parcels via text block pickup slips or (.slip) files
• Tracking of packaged or downloaded/downloading parcels.

2. What’s not included in this release

• This is a windows 2000/XP only release.
• Not all localized text appear on screen for tooltips and error messages
• Ability to automatically resume or retry broken downloads
• Support for corporate firewalls is an upcoming feature that is not yet included in this release.
• Double-clicking on the pickup slip file type is not supported yet
  

3. Installation

• Download the .exe installer. It will install the application under C:\Program Files\Civil Netizen and create a shortuct on the desktop.

4. Uninstall

• Under "Add/Remove Programs" select Civil Netizen (beta-release-1) and remove the application.

5. Known Issues

• As already noted aboved, resuming broken downloads or retrying parcel pickups is not yet available.
• Some users may experience a startup error where the application complains that a file "profileSelection.xul" cannot be loaded. This is a known problem and will be fixed in a future release
• File type associations are not yet made by the installer so double clicking on parcels (*.parcel) and pickup slips (*.slip) will not yield any results.  We are hoping to fix this for the next release.