BETA RELEASE 2 HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF BETA RELEASE 3.  PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

During the last month we have collected lots of good feedback and bug reports from our users around the world. After many long and late nights, I'm happy to announce our much improved second beta release. We have implemented a number of the most requested features and fixed some of the most annoying bugs.

Parcel Pickup/Download Resumption. This has been in the works for quite a while and it missed the original Beta Release 1 ship date. Now you no longer need to worry about broken downloads, intermittent wireless connections, or if your friends are not online. Netizen will continue to periodically start, retry, and resume your pickups until it is downloaded safely on your computer or until you get annoyed watching the retry timer count down and click "Cancel".

Friendlier Pickup Slip Emails. We added the name of your parcel and its size as part of the subject line when you choose to email a pickup slip to your recipients. That should make it easier to distinguish which pickup slip is which.

Service Status Check. As we continue to improve and update the network and its software you may experience some difficulty connecting to the network or initiating pickups. Instead of cursing in frustration you can now check on the status of the network by clicking on the "Help"->"Check Service Status" menu item. That will open up your browser to our status page, where I will be posting service bulletins regarding any problems or planned outages.

UI updates. We've updated the look and feel of the Track Status page to be a bit more readable and to accomodate the new Parcel Pickup Resumption feature. I've also added the SHIFT-CLICK multi select convention for quickly selecting a set of parcels under that view.

Stability and reliability updates. In our previous release, many of our users experienced a number of connectivity and instability problems with our network. A majority of the development time for this release has been spent working with some of our users to diagnose and solve these problems (detailed list below). Special thanks to Derek, Katy, Ken, Gunny and Mutlu for taking the time out to help me diagnose some of these problems. Though work continues in this area, this release should be a bit more resilient and should connect to the network in a faster and more reliable manner.

Please continue to send us bug reports if you run into any problems. I look into each and every issue and personnaly try to respond with a workaround if possible. Also, please check if your problem has been documented on our FAQ. Chances are, it is already addressed over there.

We're constantly improving and if you have a suggestion or comment, drop us a line by commenting on this blog entry, the discussion forums or via the support email. Keep an eye out for us next month, when we deliver the next new set of features.

A detailed set of changes and important known issues in this release is provided below.

1. New Features in this release:

Case 34: Support resumption of broken transfers
Case 93: Cleanup blank Track Status page
Case 98: Add parcel name and size to the email subject line
Case 162: Add Help Menu item to check service status
Case 189: Implement SHIFT-CLICK parcel selection under Track Status

2. Bugs Fixed in this release:

Case 125: Crash after download completion
Case 152: Crash after upload completion
Case 163: Network discovery phase stalling
Case 166: Connection failure over high latency networks
Case 193: Network reconnect failure
Case 90: Pickup slips invalidated on crash
Case 115: Download parcel during discovery phase crashes application
Case 169: DNS discovery failure
Case 126: Unpack button does not appear after download completes
Case 153: Sending small parcels stalls transfer
Case 195: Unpack option not disabled for incomplete parcels
Case 114: During "Discovering..." Netizen crashes when "Download Parcel" is clicked
Case 169: DNS configuration failure
Case 153: Sending a very small parcel does not work

3. 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
• Support for corporate firewalls is an upcoming feature that is not yet included in this release.

4. Installation:

• Please uninstall the previous version of the application before installing the new one. Your parcel listings and settings will be preserved across the two versions.

5. Uninstall:

• Under "Add/Remove Programs" select Civil Netizen (beta-release-2) and remove the application.

6. Known Issues

• 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.
• If you try to overwrite a previous installation of Civil Netizen without uninstalling it first, then clicking on "Run Civil Netizen" option from the installer will have no affect. You will need to manually start Civil Netizen after installation.

7. MD5 Fingerprint
CivilNetizen.beta-release-2.en-US.win32.exe: 2e8384db0ea852f97e383fd92f53b63d