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Entries by Paolo (17)
Got rid of the old skin
The old skin has finally been stripped away. We also did some rearranging and separated form elements in the UI from more complicated widgets. In the "Package Parcel" screen for example, the drag and drop area from is no longer clutters the input form elements as an inline widget. This allowed us to add a description field to allow users to add metadata about the parcel. This information will be viewable on the web and it will be displayed right before a user initiates their download.
Paolo
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Still a Work In Progress
Although the actual Netizen Desktop code is in good shape for a March release, our unified MacOSX and Windows desktop UI still needs a lot of work. Below is a screenshot of the UI as of this afternoon. Notice how we removed the sidebar and relocated its contents above the navigation toolbar. We're still contemplating whether or not to keep that faint border between the menu bar and the toolbar. It seems to have a cleaner look without that 1 pixel border, but for now we'll stick to the current Windows UI style guide.
We still have icons, design elements, and tons of CSS left to do to complete the UI refresh. This release is designed to integrate well with our new website design and especially with the MacOSX look and feel, but it should also look pretty under Vista and XP. I'll post another screenshot as I make progress with the reskinning work throughout the next couple of weeks. I can't wait to get rid of that blue, Windows XP color. It's hurting my eyes.
March Madness
It's still slow going over here but we've finally come up with a release date. Expect the next release of Netizen by the end of March 2008. The new desktop client will be launched with our new web service as Netizen Express.
Where the hell is Beta 9?
...That’s a great question. I wish I had a better idea, but it is notoriously hard to deduce effort and time estimates for fixing bugs so the best I can say for now is ‘soon’, and definitely before Firefox 3 hits the streets. We are trying to get the quality of Beta Release 9 to a point that is at least better than that of Beta Release 8. Part of the delay is that we are trying to move beyond simple peer to peer file sharing and integrate Netizen with the larger Web experience. As a result, many architectural changes had to be made to support such a hybrid architecture. We were getting to a point where the existing architecture could not support any of the new ideas we wanted to implement so we decided to bite the bullet and get a lot of it done for this next release. So what is so so new about Beta 9?
We released Beta 8 in early 2007. The first few months of work after that release was focused on fixing a huge pile of networking and reliability bugs that we’ve accumulated in the first 8 releases of the software. Though Netizen already works pretty well in high-speed countries like Iceland, Japan, Switzerland, and the UK, the next release should perform better here in the US and in other countries that have crappy broadband like us (that’s you France and Canada). I’ve also switched the parcel archiver to be more dual-core friendly and support 64-bit file sizes. In addition to faster packaging times, this means that you will probably never have to worry about how large or how much you can transfer unless you have an 8 exabyte hard drive lying around and the bandwidth to move it.
This Ain't the Internet, It's An Arms Race
And I am an arms dealer, fitting you with weapons in the form of software. But while most broadband customers don't care which side of the Net Neutrality debate wins, ISPs are continuing to discriminate data based on the type of traffic flowing on their network. The latest move by Comcast is one of the firsts by a large US based ISP. Instead of investing in network upgrades to keep up with broadband demand, they have decided that it would be more "Comcastic" to start deploying expensive and sophisticated technology to slow down p2p traffic. Though the Wired article points out that they are within their legal rights to discriminate data based on the type of traffic (as opposed to its origin), by not acknowledging that they are indeed implementing this practice they are knowingly doing their customers a disservice.
Ok, back to weapons development. No more blogging while listening to pop music for me.
Chasing Vista and Leopard
As a desktop software developer, I get a heart attack every time there is a new operating system on the horizon. There is always a flurry of debugging and testing activity just to ensure that the application runs as expected on the new OS. It takes a lot of time to check if any existing APIs have changed and to determine what can be done to support any modified behaviors. It takes even more time to ensure that an application still behaves the same across all versions of the operating system. It’s necessary for ensuring quality but it most definitely gets in the way of writing new features.
With Windows Vista’s release earlier this year, we have been spending the last few months modifying and testing the application to run on the new platform. Though the next version of Netizen should run without the need for the Windows XP compatibility setting, it will be another version before we get all the Windows Vista UAC issues sorted out. I think our Auto-Update mechanism will be the first to experience some problems, even with the next release.
Mac OS X Leopard is set for release this month and I have yet to try Netizen on a developer preview release of that OS. I don’t have enough test machines for that. I wish Apple would just let me run their OS on a virtual machine. But until I get another Mac Mini with the new OS, expect inconsistent behavior from Netizen. Actually, I just hope Netizen launches on the new OS. I’m not sure how the updated Finder and the new Stacks and Time Machine feature will affect the application. The new Leopard features are really exciting, but I hope the API changes and feature work required to get Netizen to shine on the new platform doesn’t send me into shock. I think I was actually happy when Apple announced earlier this year that they were delaying the release of Leopard. Anyway, if anyone gets a chance to try Netizen on Leopard, please let me know how it goes.
Rogers Cable Degrading All Encrypted IP Traffic
For those critics that say net neutrality regulation is “a solution in search of a problem”, then I present you with this. After spending months trying to help Netizen users in Canada troubleshoot their network performance problems, I’m declaring that the Rogers Cable network is crap. Rogers Cable customers have some of the highest incidents of network connectivity and performance problems in our user base. It only lends credence to the “truemors” that Rogers Cable in Canada has escalated their packet shaping practices to the outright degradation of all encrypted IP traffic. Rogers Cable is really treating their customers like idiots if they think that the Internet is just for web browsing. Customers using legitimate encrypted services such as Netizen, VPN, Skype, Joost, SFTP, secure IM, SMTP/TLS and even Xbox Live will continue to suffer until they make their wallets heard and switch to another ISP. I hope that this is not going to be a trend among ISPs.
But I haven’t given up on Rogers Cable customers, though. We’ve never counted on the ISPs to do us any favors, but this has helped us identify specific problems and make some improvements to the next version of Netizen (yes, we’re still working on it) so that we can better serve users that may have less than stellar ISP connectivity. We have started improving Netizen’s resiliency and overall experience to minimize the pain and interruption that busted connectivity has on our users’ workflow. Maybe I should juice Netizen up with some intelligent AS-level routing for good measure. The fight has just begun; because who’s to say that this won’t happen with my own ISP.
Civil Netizen Beta Release 8
It seems like some of the initial optimizations for dual-core CPUs that we made available last month backfired. While it made packaging parcels and LAN transfers significantly faster, it also caused an unacceptable amount of CPU time to be consumed by the application. We are making a new version available to correct this problem. Expect a more feature laden release next time around.
Civil Netizen Beta Release 7
Speed, speed, and more speed. Some of our loyal users have pointed out that Netizen was not taking total advantage of their LAN’s network capacity and that they were hoping for more speed in these situations. So for this release, we have included a number of enhancements to ensure that Netizen can detect, adjust and go full throttle in a LAN environment. Your speed will vary of course depending on how fast your computer can pump data to the network. We have added enhancements that will allow hyper-threaded and dual-core computers to scale better in those environments. This release also fixes some problems discovered by our users that would unexpectedly crash Netizen during the middle of transfers. We also make sure that, like the Windows version, the Mac OS X version only uses one window for the application and that permission problems during startup won’t prevent the application from running.
Civil Netizen Beta Release 6
BETA RELEASE 6 HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF BETA RELEASE 7. PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
Today, we are proud to announce Netizen Beta Release 6. This release includes a number of convenience features that our users have long been asking for. First and foremost is the addition of the ability for Windows users to minimize Netizen to the system tray. If there are outstanding parcels waiting to be picked up or are if there are downloads or uploads in progress, Netizen will ask the user if they want to minimize the application to the system tray instead of closing the window and shutting down. This release also registers the pickup slip and parcel file types with Windows, allowing users to double-click on a pickup slip from their desktop to load it onto Netizen. This is a good alternative to copy and pasting pickup slips and should allow users to send pickup slips as email file attachments or post it on their blog or website. This release also corrects an upload progress calculation error in the "Parcel Details" screen and improves the networking engine to ensure more efficient uploads and downloads.