AllPeers Review
After lot of waiting Qwerty invited me to the windows beta (I will also review the Linux version if it has any changes). It looks great first you have to install it and I faced a tough problem installing it, then I came to conclusion that the problem was the sidebar extension the Firefox which was creating the problem so I went ahead and uninstalled it.
The thing is gigantic with 3.5 mb size and I did sacrifice a bit of my startup time (maybe a second or two, it’s negligible because my computer is not good at handling large processes). First of all after the installation and the restart we are taken to a registration page where we have to give the activation code, a username of choice and then also our email ID. I see there is a problem if you reinstall the extension then it does not accept the old username and email id and the activation code. You have to ask them at their support thread for a help in reseting this problem. The problem will be solved I believe by some time but the problem will only be faced by the testers I guess.
Now lets see about the functionality. Using it seemed too easy. Its just like browsing net when you browse into someones collection. You can invite guys to join you in the testing of allpeers in the starting. No need to worry about privacy the files you want to share are decided by you and no one can reach on to other files on PC(unless anyone finds an exploit which is a rare chance). It shows when your friends are online on Firefox. The most irritating thing is using an Instant Messenger side by side with it so it means it requires a fairly simple chat feature which is in making I guess.
Another thing I noticed was that I couldn’t see the size of files which is a bit problem. You can share any type of files on it and you can even add description to the file. But one thing that disappointed me was that there is nothing to show what is happening to your download. It has absolutely no progress bar or anything and I have problems when it comes to that. I would have liked if it showed a progress bar while downloading from others rather than making it elaborate it should be simple or else the extension will be bigger in terms of size.
There are many things which could be added to it other than these like a feature where it tells who is downloading from us and also how much we uploaded and downloaded. There are many things to be done and we have to wait as it is in beta right now so I will continue to test it till it becomes a full fledged extension.
PS:An advice for anyone testing Allpeers. Everyone should backup their profile once they install Allpeers as u have to activate it and if u reinstall Firefox it all goes away and you have to make the developers reset your account.
I have all the screenshots but rather than uploading them to imageshack, I chose to put them up on my flickr you can view them there.
Check them out here
Edit: After all the time I was lazy i took the pain of making them available to you directly from here. ALso my id in Alpeers is kato forgot to say that earlier
Technorati Tags: AllPeers, Firefox, AllPeers Review
May 9th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Lucky you got first bite on this. I was waiting for the key for too long. Question on performance: do you experience any slow on donwload or sharing? I heard they can only share up to 50 files at a time. not sure it’s true.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Nope not true anout 50 files my friend shares many like 100’s with me. And about the downloading speed they depend on the guy who shares the file. I havent tried a big file as of now but it obviously depends on the upload speed of your friend.