Portable and standard edition merged

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

It had to happen of course. PeerAware now simply detects if a user has admin priveleges. If he does then the normal edition will be installed. Otherwise PeerAware will run in portable mode.

PeerAware is shared knowledge management software for use in the enterprise. Teams use it for group chat, for sharing documents and for the shared whiteboard.

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1.05 is out! And now it is fast!

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Today I released PeerAware 1.05. I just found that now is about time. I have been making tons of improvements, and today I found a huge bug! For a long time I have been getting reports from potential customers that PeerAware is slow. I never quite understood why they would think so, but now I know. If browsing shared folders with Asian letters it was not only slow. It just did not work, and would stay idle for ages! How I managed to let that bug slip past me I don’t know. All fixed and much much faster now of course.

As usual a lot of work has gone into improving the whiteboard. A great new functionalty is the full screen support. Just press F11 and you get much more screen real-estate for drawing.

Apart from that a lot of work is going into the web site. It is time to focus more on helping people use PeerAware efficiently, and part of that means better introductions to the program. A new video will be online soon to highlight the most important functionality, and a bunch of new web-pages are scheduled as well.

Enjoy the new release, and as usual you can download it here.

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Group chat history, connectors in the whiteboard and more.

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Hi all, last nights release gave some serious improvements:

• Most important, new tools are now available in the whiteboard for connecting elements on the whiteboard. Now it is possible to draw real flow-charts, network diagrams and more, and connect the different items. A few sample drawings taken from the whiteboard are available here.

• The whiteboard can now remember your settings between drawing different items. Sof If you choose yellow fill and orange borders 5 pixels thick, then it will use that the next time you draw a shape. Speeds things up nicely.
• Chat history is available so that you can see what people have talked about before you joined.
• A crash that haunted a few customers is fixed. Something with their firewall system resulted in a crash and instant death of PeerAware. All fixed and works great now though!

Go and download the latest version and try it out!

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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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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.

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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Search summit Norway 08

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Tomorrow I will participate in search summit Norway 08. It is Norway’s largest conference on search technology and business. Hopefully I will learn a lot of new things related to search technologies, and most likely this will find it’s way into PeerAware in one form or another. In parallel there is a conference on topic maps which could have been interesting in combination with the shared whiteboard, but at present I believe I have enough to do with getting to a 1.0 release to justify another integration project.

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Music

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

PeerAware is my way of relaxing, but in the right environment this gets even better. First of all, a nice view from the window is nice, along with some good music.

While working on PeerAware I often find myself listening to the following albums:
4 Non Blondes - Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
Frank Sinatra - My Way
Nazareth - The Ballads Album
Pearl Jam - Ten
Pink Floyd - Echoes
Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks

For some reason most of these are quite old, maybe it is time to get some new music. What would you recommend?

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PeerAware OpenSocial WorkSpace

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

The first PeerAware OpenSocial WorkSpace is now available. It is a simple modification of the OpenSocial Container Google released a week ago, and the source code is available here. A workspace is also available for testing this in the workspace list when you start PeerAware, and will just display friends listed in a workspace, along with information about yourself. As soon as Google updates their reference platform with the rest of the API’s I will add these as well to the PeerAware OpenSocial reference container. To see this in action, download PeerAware and join the OpenSocial WorkSpace.

The interesting thing about OpenSocial is that it makes it possible for third party developers to create widget applications that run inside PeerAware and integrate with just about anything. Watch this space, more will follow.

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