BETA RELEASE 5 HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF BETA RELEASE 6.  PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.  

As mentioned in one of our previous posts, today we are going to start providing a secure web bridge service to all our users for free. Starting with Beta Release 5, netizens behind restrictive firewalls will be able to send and receive parcels using a standard HTTPS connection. No configuration is necessary. The application will take care of switching to secure web bridge mode when the need arises.  With Netizen Beta Release 5, all the plumbing is in place to ensure that connectivity is guaranteed across a wide variety of networks.  Since this is the first release of our web bridge feature, minor bugs may still hang around. If you or your friends encounter any problems sending or receiving parcels, feel free to send me email and whine.  Rest assured that those problems will be addressed quickly through our auto update mechanism.  Aside from the new web bridge feature, this release contains a number of critical bug fixes and is a required upgrade for all users.

After seven long months of debugging, testing and ensuring the stability of our network, we're ready to get back to improving our application.  Get ready for some interesting new features as we make full use of the Mozilla Firefox platform and think of new ways of how we can share files with our friends, family and colleagues.  We're going to continue to streamline our application, introduce new skins and integrate better with the operating system.  With this release of Netizen, packaging and extracting parcels is much faster and you can now track and save your parcels for much longer periods of time.  This release of Netizen is also much more efficient and takes up less CPU and memory than our previous releases.  Finally, you can now see which of your friends is picking up your parcel.  Under "Parcel Details" just mouse over their transfer information and their IP address and progress information will popup for you.  You will also now be able to see how many times your parcels have been successfully downloaded.

Thanks to the countless number of netizens that have sent valuable feedback and reported bugs over the last few months.  With our network in much better shape, we will be focusing our efforts on streamlining your experience while expanding its capabilities and utility. Our next release, for example, will include the often requested feature of minimizing the application to the Windows tray.

As always, if you have any suggestions or complaints regarding Netizen, feel free to send us email or post a comment on our discussion board. A detailed set of changes and important known issues in this release is provided below.

1. New Features in this release

Case  43: Secure Web Bridge Tunneling
Case 380: Add successful pickup count to Track Status
Case 432: Transfer details should display remote IP address information
Case 310: Expand parcel expiration timeline

2. Bugs Fixed in this release

Case 412: Network discovery freezes Netizen
Case 423: Parcel archive tree displays old archive items
Case 256: Pickup slip verification fails to enable parcel download button
Case 310: Parcel reports incorrect file sizes
Case 276: Reduce CPU utilization under MacOSX and WindowsXP
Case 329: Netizen fails to unpack parcel to desktop under MacOSX
 
3. What’s not included in this release

• Not all localized text appear on screen for tooltips and error messages
• Proxy server support is not yet included in this release

4. Known Issues

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.

5. MD5 Fingerprint

CivilNetizen.beta-release-5.en-US.win32.installer.exe
298e6025af668daa0e3b6baefd43c6d2

CivilNetizen.beta-release-5.en-US.macosx.dmg
9106ecc92fa944c68c7957631329bb66