Nothing much. Everything pretty much continues to work. For the few things that don’t, you can find replacements. So rest assured, your TonidoPlug doesn’t become a $100 brick overnite.

Long Answer:

First of all, CodeLathe has no intention of going under. We are a small company, our overhead is low, our efficiency is amazing and we are slowly working on making Tonido and TonidoPlug the best software on the face of the earth. But if you are still unconvinced, a picture is worth a thousand words. So see graphics below:

If CodeLathe goes under:

• Green boxes will continue to work. Your Tonido, Apps/Data all work.
• Orange boxes functionality can be replaced by other services. e.g. use any other DynamicDNS provider
• Red boxes will not be available. This includes Tonido Photos sync, Tonido Group Workspace Sync and the Relay Service which is in Beta currently.

We went through a lot of pain to make Tonido self-sufficient. So all your existing apps continue to function as normal and more importantly your data is stored in open SQLITE database formats.

Don’t want to take our word for it? Try it now, disconnect your internet connection and see how Tonido and the apps continue to function and will continue to function after we are long gone.

Well, recently, when I was cleaning the card (of dust bunnies), I was too overzealous and I broke two of the fins on the stock cooler fan. I couldn’t do much and put the card back in hoping it would still be ok. The card still ran reasonably well, but the noise was unbearable. If I started a game, the card would start whining like a jet about to take off. It got progressively worser to the point that it started to whine even at idle.

So to cut a long story short, I was about to buy a new video card to replace the 4850. With the 4850 less than a year old, it was going to be a big loss and write off. But luckily, browsing at the local computer store, I spied a VGA cooler and took a chance, and spending $17 on it seemed easier on my wallet than a $180 GeForce GTX 260 Core 215. I took apart the stock cooler attached the new cooler and low and behold, my study area becomes so quiet even a monk could meditate. And my idle went to 50C from 85C. Load went to 65C from 100C. Not bad.

Anyway, the point I am trying to get to in my laborious way is that stock coolers are not worth anything anymore if my experience is anything to go by. My Intel Quad Core ran like a furnace till I bought a aftermarket CPU cooler. And now my video card runs at lower temps and much quieter with an aftermarket cooler as well.

What is the point of the stock cooler if it can hardly do its job and even if it did, it left your computer components hovering around 100C, ready to fry an egg. Component manufacturers owe it to themselves to do a better job with stock parts that ship with their product or they are going to lose DIY computer builders who have such a bad experience with their computer build they don’t attempt one again.

The current release has binaries for windows.  Since the application is made with platform agnostic development libraries, it will be easier for other developers to improve, extend and migrate the application to other platforms.

A Word on Tonido Webshare and WebsharePro

Webshare is an application that runs on the Tonido platform. It lets users to share files from their home computers and make it available from anywhere on the internet. It lets users create accounts for friends and family thereby giving restricted access based on the identity. You can try the free download from here.

WebsharePro extends the ability of Webshare by allowing upload of files to their home computers from anywhere on the internet. It also makes it easy for users to send and receive files from others. A browser is the only requirement to upload files to remote computer.

Drawbacks with using browser for uploads

It is important to note that there are some drawbacks in using just a browser to send files to another remote computer.

• When a user wants to upload multiple files, he/she can only upload only one file at a time.
• Hard to upload a directory and its contents. Contents can be files or sub-folders.
• It is not possible to perform drag-and-drop of files and folders to be uploaded.

WebsharePro Uploader

To overcome these issues we introduce the new WebsharePro Uploader. This is a standalone native application that is currently released only on windows. Once the application is downloaded and installed, all you need is to specify the Tonido URL, user name, password and you are good to go. You can use the built-in file/folder chooser or drag-and-drop files and folders. Uploader starts uploading them without anymore user attention. Go here for more information on setup, configuration and use of this uploader.

Download Uploader for Windows

If you don’t have WebsharePro, you can also buy it from our Tonido Store.

]]> http://www.codelathe.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/03/uploader-client-for-tonido-websharepro/feed/ http://www.codelathe.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/03/uploader-client-for-tonido-websharepro/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/codelatheblog/~3/y5uZpUpg4ds/ http://www.codelathe.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/02/new-tonido-release-020100121-highlights/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:14:48 +0000 Madhan http://www.codelathe.com/blog/?p=1913 We just released a new Tonido release 0.2.0.100121 for all 4 platforms. Windows, Mac, Linux and TonidoPlug. This is a major release.

UI is 2X faster

• With gzip encoding support, Tonido UI loads up to 2X faster over remote connections

Tonido Relaying

• Tonido Relaying Service is available as a beta service in this release. To enable relaying, go to Network->Settings. Once Enabled, simply access your Tonido instance via http://<yourprofile>.tonidoid.com. It is that simple. Please note that when using relay, you will have to disable SSL first if you have enabled it.

Application Store Licensing support

• It is now possible to buy new applications in the Tonido store and download and activate them via Tonido’s UI.
• Login into https://store.tonido.com using your store account and buy any new app. (For example WebsharePro)
• Go to the App Store tab, set your Store credentials
• Then go to the Install tab and install the new application, activate it. You are done.

There are also a bunch of bug fixes, you can see the full release notes at http://www.tonido.com/release_notes.html.

Upgrade now!

This problem is exacerbated by several issues.

1. UPnP support by most routers is really poor.
2. Port forwarding settings for routers can be convoluted and difficult to understand.
3. Port forwarding simply doesn’t work on some routers
4. Port forwarding simply doesn’t work for DHCP clients when IP changes
5. Port forwarding is not possible under some conditions because there are no user-controllable routers available in some networks. (Businesses, Campuses, Free Internet Wifi Spots).

There really is no robust solution to this problem that will work in all those above cases.

The only real solution is to relay Tonido data via a server that acts as an intermediary between the remote client and the local Tonido instance.

That is exactly what the Tonido Relay service does.

So for users who are unable to setup remote access through their firewall, Tonido Relay service is a viable alternative.

The overall simplified architecture looks like below.

There are some salient points about this service:

1. The relay service is purely a data streaming service, no data of any sort is stored or monitored. It is all a bunch of bytes.
2. Strong encryption: The connection between Tonido and the relay service is encrypted via SSL so it is resilient against snooping/hacking.
3. HTTPS SSL support will be available as well, thereby making the complete connection impregnable.
4. Relay service is purely optional (and disabled by default), everything else still works the same as always.

Tonido has always stood for the ability to be independent and self sufficient, so we agree that this service goes in the opposite direction. But in some cases, practical benefits due to this service outweigh some of the cons.

It all comes down to the choices available to a user. We believe that Tonido still offers users clear choices on how they want to access their data. If they can setup portforwarding because they have great control over their network they can do that. If they can’t, they still can use Tonido using the relay.

Relay Service will become available as a beta service in the upcoming release and on all supported platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and the TonidoPlug.

It will be free to use in the beta period.

Now loading 500KB in a local network or machine is imperceptible, but on an internet connection, especially with a slow 50KBps upload, it can take a bunch of time before the Tonido UI becomes available. It was pretty annoying, and we just put off optimizing it because we weren’t sure what it would take to make it faster.

HTTP Accept-Encoding to the Rescue

Turns out there is a a quick and dirty way of making loading huge HTML/JS chunks faster. It is something in the HTTP specification called Accept-Encoding. Supported by most modern browsers, this tells a HTTP server that the browser can handle content that is compressed. By making a simple change to send compressed HTML/JS data back to the browser there is an incredible speedup.  For example on an moderate internet connection, Tonido main page loaded originally at around 14 seconds. After this change, in a whopping low 7 seconds. (500 KB files get compressed down to ~150KB)

But, you might say, wait, isn’t the Tonido server going to do more work because of the extra compression? Yes if we did this on-the-fly, but not really. To put minimal stress on the CPU, we pre-compress the HTML/JS content in our release package before we ship. Tonido just reads it off the disk and sends it off. No on-the-fly compression.

It is a funny thing in software development, you can make huge performance leaps with small changes and then the gains get progressively smaller even after a lot of work. And at some point it is not even worth doing it. This change  just proves the point.

Until now, Tonido Torrent was exclusively available on TonidoPlug.We have now made it available for desktop users as well.

To know how Tonido Torrent can make things easier, check out the following Youtube video.

So what are you waiting for? Dust off that old computer in your garage. Install Tonido on it to own an always-on Torrent appliance that can be managed from anywhere. Also, you have the option of owning our low-power, low cost home server the TonidoPlug.

If you are a Firefox user, don’t forget to install Tonido Torrent Firefox add-on. This add-on simplifies your torrent experience by sending torrent files directly from your browser to the Tonido Torrent application. Additional help on Tonido Torrent application can be found here.

If you are already using Tonido, Go to Apps in the Tonido Admin page and click the Install tab where you will see Tonido Torrent will be listed as “Application available for installation”. Click install and you are all set.

If you are new to Tonido, you can download the application from Tonido Website.

Happy Torrenting !!!

In this post, let me walkthrough a simple JS script that grabs data from Tonido Thots applications and displays them.

For this JS to work, you need to make sure the JS code is being served up by Tonido itself, otherwise, due to the cross-domain scripting rules, the script won’t run. To make Tonido serve these files up, you can add these files to a folder and share it via Webshare and then load the .html page by clicking on it in Webshare file listing.

Doing AJAX via JS can be a chore unless you let a library do all the dirty work for you. In this case, I am using jQuery. It is especially excellent for parsing the XML that is returned by Tonido’s HTTP calls.

First, in the code below, we set an event handler so that when the link is clicked, we make a call to the ‘getauthenticationinfo’ HTTP API. This returns the status of the currently logged in user etc via XML.

 $(document).ready(function(){
       $("a").click(function(event){
         $.get('http://127.0.0.1:10001/core/getauthenticationinfo', function(data) {
 		 var $entry = $(data).find('info');
		 var $profile = $entry.find('profile').text();
		 if ($profile == "")
		 {
		     alert("Profile Not Logged IN");
		 }
		 else
		 {
			if ($entry.find('authenticated').text() == "1")
			{
				getThots();
			}
			else
			{
                             alert("Profile logged in, but needs to be authenticated");
			}
		}
		});
          event.preventDefault();
         return false;
       });
     });

This XML response below contains several pieces of information. The primary being the authenticated element. Each value of that element represents something as you can see from the JS. If it is “1″ we are ready to make our next call. That is of course to get the actual thots data.

<authenticationinfo>
          <info>
              <profile>mytonidoprofile</profile>
             <displayname>Madhan</displayname>
             <peerid>mytonidoprofile@tonidoid.com</peerid>
             <authenticated>>1< /span></authenticated>
             <isremote>>0< /span></isremote>
             <reasoncode>>0< /span></reasoncode>
          </info>
</authenticationinfo>

Getting the Thots data is a simple HTTP call again passed in with a bunch of GET parameters. The return naturally is XML again.

function getThots()
{
	$.get('http://127.0.0.1:10001/app/thots/getthots?offset=0&max=10&datefilter=&categoryfilter=&searchfilter=',
                             function (data) {
				var $meta = $(data).find('totalrecords').text();
				var $thots = $(data).find('thot').each(function ()
                                 {
				     var $entry = $(this);
				     var $content = $entry.find('displaycontent').text();
				     var $displaycontent = jQuery("<div><br><br><i>"+$content+"</i><br><br></div>");
				    $displaycontent.appendTo(document.body);
				});
		}, "xml");
 }

Which looks like the below:

<thots>
    <meta>
    <totalrecords>>60</totalrecords>
    </meta>
    <thot>
        <id>>75</id>
        <title/>
        <displaycontent>Interesting Thot</displaycontent>
        <content>Interesting Thot</content>
        <status/>
        <date>>2009-07-20 13:08:09< /span></date>
        <pageobjectindex>>1< /span></pageobjectindex>
        <pagenumobjects>>10</pagenumobjects>
        <totalobjects>>60</totalobjects>
        <totalcategories>>1< /span></totalcategories>
        <categoryid_0>>1< /span></categoryid_0>
        <categorytext_0>Bookmarks</categorytext_0>
       <categoryparentid_0>-1< /span></categoryparentid_0>
       <category_texts>Bookmarks</category_texts>
       <displaycategory_texts>Bookmarks</displaycategory_texts>
       <category_ids>>1,</category_ids>
    </thot>
    ...
</thots>

We parse the XML and append it to the document in the loop. So the effect is when you click the link you see list of thots entries.

This is for sake of example and is trivial to write. Imagine you could do the same thing, but create a page which showed your Tasks/Calendars/Thots/Webshare Upload History all in one shot. Maybe even a text box to quickly add a torrent in one shot. That would be fun.

You can even write a mini Tonido application with a different UI just by running Webshare JS and HTML files. The possibilities are endless.

Tonido’s implements almost all of the app functionality using HTTP APIs. You can study these APIs and responses easily using FireBug. If you want more documentation, you can read the official documentation for the HTTP APIs in the reference documentation.

Download the full source for this sample.

With the set of applications that we have released so far, we have only scratched the surface of what can be done using the platform. With the release of the SDK, we want to enable unleashing the widest range of developer creativity. To reach that goal, we have worked hard to make the platform as attractive to developers as possible.

We promised earlier that we will release the platform under a open license and we delivered. The platform SDK is licensed under a liberal Apache License 2.0 with a binary naming clause. The license basically allows developers to build Tonido applications and release it under whatever terms they want to. They can use the SDK to build both free and paid apps without restrictions or conditions.

Tonido App Store coming soon

Also, as developers start working on building apps, we will be opening the Tonido App Store soon. We want to make developer’s lives as easy as possible by making it free to list your apps on the store and making it even simpler to sell your apps there as well to the expanding Tonido user base.

The Tonido app store will be a ready-made sales platform for Tonido app developers as we will handle all the transactions, patching, updating, licensing, plumbing and other tasks so you can just set the price and concentrate on developing great stuff. (and thinking about how to spend the money)

Tonido Early Bird Developer Challenge

To kick start Tonido App Development, we are announcing a Tonido Early Bird Developer Challenge. The first three Tonido apps submitted and approved for inclusion in our Tonido App store will win an Apple iPod Touch 32 GB. To get selected, the app has to satisfy the following four criteria and at least work fully in one OS.

1. Originality of Concept–Does the application introduce a great new idea; for example, a new angle on applications?
2. Effective Use of the Tonido Platform–Does the application take advantage of Tonido’s unique and compelling features?
3. Polish and Appeal–Is the application easy to use and aesthetically appealing?
4. Indispensability–Is the application compelling and essential, such as a utility a user can’t live without?

iPod Touch Copyright(c) Apple

Getting Started with the SDK

The SDK is available via our SVN repository with anonymous read access. Read more about how to get started at our developers portal at http://developer.tonido.com. Along with the SDK, there are 3 sample applications bundled to get started. A hello world app, a developer API tester app and finally the complete source for Thots application. All samples are also released under the Apache License 2.0, so developers can borrow, adopt code in their own apps. We plan to open source a few more Tonido Apps under liberal license terms as well in the future.

Tonido’s SDK allows devs to target all four platforms, Windows, MacOSX, Ubuntu Linux and TonidoPlug easily.  So if you are careful about the API’s you use it is extremely easy to make your application work seamlessly multi-platform.

Over the coming days we will share more information in our blog and forum about the SDK and add more developer documentation to our developer website. If you have questions, please give us a shout in the developer forum, or send us an email at support@codelathe.com.

So developers, what else are you waiting for? Download the SDK and get started hacking today.

Hoping to hit the UK market very soon