Archive for 2008

PeerAware portable edition

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Just recently I became aware of that Google’s new browser did something peculiar with their installer. They did not install into the standard “Program Files” folder, rather they installed the program into \users\username\appdata\local\google\.

My first thought was that yes, this is a nice way to avoid requiring admin privileges. And Microsoft has stated that it is just bad programming that makes so many programs require admin privileges. On the other hand it does undermine the IT departments strict security policies. But then again, I don’t really care about that, I believe users are capable of managing their own computers just fine. And I certainly want to let any user try out PeerAware.

And of course, here it is: PeerAware portable edition.

What is great about this is that it requires no admin privileges, does not write to the registry and does not run any services. And all settings are kept in the same folder as the program itself.

The bad thing is that for now it does not have autostart and does not discover nearby workspaces. On the other hand, if you know what a portable edition of a program is I am pretty sure you will be able to to make this work for you.

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PeerAware Group Chat - Enterprise knowledge software

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

Enterprise knowledge software is the new phrase used to describe PeerAware. Initially this started out as “Desktop to desktop search” a few years back, but this did not mean anything to most people. And the advantage of being able to search across a network of connected computers and find documents based on content was interesting, but in reality just a technicality that most users just took for granted. This is fine, in reality it is all we could hope for. But it did not lead new users to try the program, almost no-one finds PeerAware through search engines, most people download the program through word of mouth, and simply because there are a few established knowledge networks running based on PeerAware. But I do want a name that sort of says something about what the program does, and recently arrived at the conclusion that the group chat functionality was what most users appreciated and used the most. That made me change the name to “PeerAware - Group chat”. But a month later I felt like this was oversimplifying things, and a new name was chosen: “PeerAware Group Chat - Enterprise knowledge software”, which should lead people into an understanding of what it can be used for. And with 1.04 out the door the new name is public.

Hope you like it,

Jonny

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Software messaging, IM style group chat

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

With PeerAware 1.03 out the door we finally have a much better messaging behaviour. With the file sharing and search parts of PeerAware stabilizing focus is now changing to making this into a great group chat solution. The first part of this is now done, and it is now much easier to get the attention of other PeerAware users who are running with the program in minimized mode.

When any user sends a message a notification window is displayed, modelled after how Windows Live Messenger displays notifications. Hence the behaviour should be something most users are familiar with.

PeerAware is of course a great group chat and knowledge management software program with file sharing support and a shared whiteboard.

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PeerAware 1.01 out

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

Found this on BoS this evening, food for thought:

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle.
But when the sun comes up, you hit the ground running.
And with that PeerAware 1.01 is out and available. Hope you like it, now available in Italian thanks to generous help from Luca Venturi, one very skilled programmer and a good friend.

PeerAware is software that lets you create a knowledge sharing network where you shared documents and knowledge with coworkers.

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Google worried?

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Two weeks ago a great thing happened to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Google decided to include actual number of people searching for each keyword combination in the search engine.

The keyword tool is used to find combination of words that can be used for advertising on the Google search engine or in the Google Ad network. Companies that pay for these keyword combinations get to display their text-ads next to the search results, and have to pay Google for people who click their ads.

Getting real search numbers is a relief and boon to all internet marketing people who struggle to understand what people are searching for. My first thought was “Great, now let’s see what people are interested in and where my program fits in!”. And for a few days it was fascinating to type in different keywords, find combinations with lots of competition, and even much more used combinations without any competition.

Then I started wondering, why did they do this?

The first answer is simple. They believe they will make more money by doing so. Maybe because new keyword combinations will become more interesting, or because of the news factor where people flock to the keyword tool and spend more money on marketing with keyword campaigns. But then again, why not do this years ago?

Another possibility is that interest in keyword advertising is falling (or not rising as fast as it used to), people are clicking less on advertisements or a combination of the two. So in a sense they could be getting desperate.

And then Google’s quarterly results were released, without Wall Street being too happy. Google hiring just 448 new employees the last quarter was the final confirmation.

I believe Google is worried, and if they are, so am I.

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Knowledge sharing network

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

One of the main focuses while creating PeerAware has always been to create a system that supports creating a knowledge sharing network. With the latest release a few such networks have emerged and every day I am getting more feedback from these. Among the requests I have received is the possibility to create question-answer-documents based on topics discussed in a workspace chat. I have a few ideas for how to implement such a system, and expect one of the next beta releases to include this.

The intention then is to make sure that topics discussed in a workspace chat can be converted to a document that can be found through a normal PeerAware search. Watch this space, there is a lot more to come!

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Improving the shared whiteboard

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

With Beta 11 of PeerAware the shared whiteboard became much more visually pleasing, and with the latest theming and icon upgrades the usability of PeerAware is improving rapidly. Focus for the next couple of weeks will be to add support for linking objects together in the whiteboard, to enable drawing diagrams with smart connections. This has been a weak spot in the current implementation. Also expect to see more export functionality, something quite a few people have requested so far.

The problem as always is time of course, so now it is back to coding instead of writing on the blog.

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New graphics

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

A lot of effort has gone into upgrading the user interface of PeerAware, and among the improvements a new set of smilies and user icons have been created. The user icons are based on work by Juliane Krug, and the smilies are based on Nicolas Gaglianis work. All of the svgs are taken from the openclipart library where the base drawings have been put into the public domain.

The SVGs used as source for the new icons in peeraware.

I use Inkscape for all my graphics needs both in PeerAware and on the web-site. It is a great editor for drawing, and for each new version it has improved both usability and feature-set.

The new user interface of PeerAware is both simpler and more esthetically pleasing. Still a lot can be improved for even better usability, and I will just continue updating both the UI and functionality. I hope you will enjoy what will come over the next months.

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Writing p2p programs in javascript and html

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Traditionally it has only been possible to create web-pages with the client-server model. This model is based upon the web browser connecting to a web server, requesting a web page and displaying the result. The last 3-4 years Ajax and web 2.0 has been all the rage, and has greatly improved how a web page can interact with the web server. With Ajax a web page can do async requests to a web server, and this makes it possible to construct programs out of a web page. A great example of this is Google Maps.


Using PeerAware it is now possible to create peer-to-peer web pages, or even combine the best from a client-server architecture with p2p. With PeerAware you run your own private p2p workspace, and all communication goes between connected members. The user-interface to the workspace is a web page with chat functionality, where all chat commands are sent across the p2p network to all connected members. It is the same communication path that can be used by customized web-pages. The owner of a PeerAware workspace decides what web-page should be loaded for members who connect to his workspace, and this web-page has a set of javascript functions available that can be used for communication between instances of the page.


To illustrate the concept a tutorial is available for those who want to use or make their own p2p javascript programs. I hope you enjoy this, it can be a lot of fun! If you have PeerAware installed you can also connect directly to the tutorial workspace.

Another example of this concept is the shared whiteboard that is part of the default workspace. This is a lot more advanced than the tutorial workspace, but if you are interested, the code is located in the html folder in the PeerAware program installation. This defaults to C:\Program Files\PeerAware in english language installations.

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So long as it is black

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black” Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography.

PeerAware knowledge software is much the same from this release on. Finally PeerAware runs on all Windows desktop operating systems from Windows 2000 to the latest versions of Vista. Of course it runs better on the later versions, basically due to support for service discovery. If you do run it on windows 2000 you will have to update internet explorer to version 6, but once you do it will work just fine.

For strange reasons SSDP and UPnP Host Device services are disabled on windows server operating systems, but PeerAware will work without problems even so. But if you do enable these services, computers running PeerAware on nearby computers will discover workspaces running on the servers and display these in the local network list.

In general it is recommended to run PeerAware on Windows server if you regularly have more than a few hundred people working in the same workspace, as network connections are not limited on these versions of windows, and performance is better. Also, in general you will want a workspace to be on all the time so it makes more sense to run it on a server. Both Windows server 2003 and 2008 work perfectly with PeerAware, just install and configure like you would on a desktop machine.

You can get beta 10 from the download page.

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