]]> http://blog.wakoopa.com/2009/07/01/win-some-free-software-shirts/feed/ 28 catchmikey TheMacBundle http://blog.wakoopa.com/2009/06/26/linux-update-web-tracking-and-bugfixes/ http://blog.wakoopa.com/2009/06/26/linux-update-web-tracking-and-bugfixes/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:14:17 +0000 Wouter http://blog.wakoopa.com/?p=678 ]]>

We’re happy to announce version 1.1 of the Wakoopa tracker for Linux. This update introduces web tracking support in Firefox and has numerous other fixes and improvements.

You will be offered the option of disabling web tracking if you don’t want to track your web applications. Read more on how we do web tracking in our FAQ. We’re looking for options to support other browsers in the future as well.

You can update using our APT repository or just grabbing one of the deb, rpm or binary downloads. The full list of changes:

• Add support for Firefox (>=3.0) web application tracking
• Fix a rare bug where extremely high usage values would be reported
• Allow the user to force a submit of the usage data (useful for situations where you know you will be offline soon)
• Correctly pick up Adobe Air applications
• Better Mono application detection on Debian/Ubuntu
• More reliable application tracking
• Fixed bug with empty alert menu on start
• Fixed bug with invalid URL for some alerts

Special thanks again to Marten Klencke for making this happen!

After the software pages and the team pages, we’ve now updated the profiles. And how! After consulting with you guys and with a slew of ideas, we set out to give the profiles a fresh new look.

One of the complaints we heard was a lack of information about the users. We’ve added the possibility to display a bio and link to your website so you can tell the world who you are.

Favorites

We ditched the ticker with your recent software for something much more you: A list of your favorites! Adding a new favorite is easy, just go to a software page and click the “favorite” button. We have a suggestion for your first…

Charts

The biggest update is our new chart. It displays how much of the different types of software you’ve been using in the past nine days. Check it out on my profile, for example.

Other charts have been moved to the usage page, and you can expect these type of charts to pop up over Wakoopa in the coming period!

More

There are a lot more updates (including on the subpages, so check those out), but instead of listing them here, why not find them out yourself?

We’re really happy with this big update and anxious to hear what you think, so please let us know in the comments!

Short story: the first public version of the Wakoopa tracker for Linux tracker is available. Already a user? Go the the install instructions. If not, sign up and and follow the steps.

Ever since we launched almost two years ago, we’ve had people in our mailbox, in our support channel, on our blog, on Twitter and even in person telling us we had to add support for Linux-based operating systems.

We agreed. Linux is more and more becoming a viable alternative to Windows and OS X. So during the end of 2008, we decided to focus resources on developing a Linux tracker.

A few months ago we started testing the first version with a small group of enthusiasts. Lots of stuff went wrong and we really had to take our time to get everything right. All the feedback we got resulted in a version that is now ready for a first public launch.

The Wakoopa tracker for Linux supports all the big Linux distributions and has proven to work as well with more exotic ones as well. It’s made in C++ with gtk+ to keep resource usage low and OS-integration non-obtrusive. The tracker is fully functional, except for web tracking (see our FAQ why).

Getting interested? If you’re already a Wakoopa user, check the install instructions. If not, just sign up and follow the steps.

We would like to thank all the beta testers for their time and effort, without you guys we wouldn’t be this far. You guys rock! Also, special kudos go to Marten Klencke for doing a very impressive job implementing the tracker for Linux.

Finishing off: we try our best, but we’re bound to have stuff going wrong. Especially with first releases. If you see a bug, have feedback (good or bad) or an idea to improve Wakoopa, let us know and we’ll try to respond accordingly.

Have you tried our new search yet? It’s pretty neat. Not only have we improved the relevance of searches, but there’s also some new filters you can play with.

For instance: you can now also search software by price and category, in addition to license and operating system. If you’re a Wakoopa member, you can even search in your own software and those of your contacts.

This allows you to check out all free RAR archiving tools on Mac for instance. Or all free first person shooter games out there, or open-source messenger clients. What search queries do you find useful? We’d love your feedback on this.

We’ve seen a not so positive phenomenon on Wakoopa recently. Some people have started bombarding other random users with friend requests, in the hope they will add them back. A mutual friend after all is worth 5 points in our reputation system. Et voila: spam! This isn’t really how we had imagined this, so we’ve now disabled these points. Another lesson learned, sorry.

Since I hate writing negative blog posts like this, I thought it would be fun to give away some free stuff. How about a Wakoopa t-shirt? We’ll send one to a randomly selected commenter on this post. So in other words: post a reply and receive something fly!

Update: this is now the most commented post on our blog. Congrats ElTopo, a shirt is coming your way!

I’m happy to announce the release of the inaugural edition of our quarterly software trends report, named The State of Apps.

Since we started with Wakoopa, we’ve acquired over 525 million hours of software usage data from 75,000 members. In total, 200,000 applications have been logged on our platform so far. Wakoopa users have also shared more than 3 million application recommendations to date.

This means that we have a great understanding of what applications are on the rise, and what audiences are using them. An example of this was the upcoming of the Google Chrome browser, or more recently new Twitter clients such as Tweetie.

This report seeks to highlight these important trends in the desktop software and web applications industry that are timely and relevant. Our goal is to provide new insights into how desktop and web applications have emerged and evolved over the first quarter of 2009, and what titles and phenomena are most important now.

The Wakoopa community consists of a wide variety of professionals and end-users who are early technology adopters by nature. Our recent survey revealed the following user statistics:

• 48% of Wakoopa users rate themselves as extremely proficient with computers and software
• 88% of the Wakoopa community is male with a median age of 26.9 years.
• 41% of Wakoopa users are based in the US and 10% are based in the UK, with an additional 15% in Europe and 10% in Asia
• 31% of all Wakoopa users state that the current economic times have forced them to curtail how much they spend on software

Some of the key findings revealed include:

1. Facebook usage is consistent throughout working and non-working hours. Daily activity on social networks across all regions peaked on average between 9 and 10 PM. Daily activity across all web applications was highest between 4 and 5 PM.
2. Twitter continued its growth spike throughout the entire first quarter of 2009 with a heavy increase in March 2009. Tweetdeck ranked first among users who posted updates to Twitter via desktop with Twhirl a close second.
3. The most popular newcomer among Twitter clients, as well as overall apps on Mac is Destroy Twitter.
4. The most popular newcomers on Windows are games, Burnout Paradise and Mirror’s Edge.
5. Windows Live Hotmail and Symbaloo were the fastest gainers among web apps while Google Friend Connect and Veoh showed the greatest decline.
6. Google Chrome is making a significant impact on the browser market with 15% usage across all countries and age groups. The Opera browser market has its highest adoption levels in Europe. Firefox is the dominant browser of choice worldwide for Wakoopa users.
7. The game, World of Warcraft has its highest percentage of usage in Asia.
8. Windows Live Messenger is the dominant IM client on Windows worldwide
   and across all age groups. This differs in North America however, where IM usage is divided among several 3rd party IM clients, including Skype and Digsby.

Here’s a two-page preview of the report:

This report is sponsored by Pearson, the media and publishing company behind well-known global brands including the Financial Times, Penguin books, and Pearson Education. As big fans of their company, it’s great to have them on board.

Thanks also to Moiz Syed, the designer of this report. He was responsible for all visualizations, and did an outstanding job in making the graphics understandable as well as unique in style.

For more information about custom analytics or bespoke research, please contact us.

Read about it on:

• Giga Om
• TechCrunch
• VentureBeat
• PRWeb

… and it rocks.

But seriously folks. We’ve settled in a new office near Dam Square in Amsterdam. Thanks to our previous office mates from The Next Web and Twones for putting up with us these last few years. We’ve now got our own place and it’s beautiful if I do say so myself. Notice the mural behind it? Yep, it’s a Nozzman. Thanks Nozz!

In other news:

• Wi-wihi-wiki’s!
  Have you checked out the new wiki-structure for the software pages yet? You can now take a look at what’s changed on an application page (like on TweetDeck or Gmail) and the layout is a bit more easy on the eyes. Additionally, if you’re an ‘expert’ on Wakoopa, you can now submit the details and they will be put on the site immediately. We won’t check ‘em first, but we’ll keep an eye on everything behind the screens. Previously, we needed to check all your entries (100+ a day) by hand. This will certainly speed things up.
• Ruby interns, you can haz
  Are you looking for a web development internship? Come work on Wakoopa in Amsterdam and we’ll give you room to grow into Ruby (on Rails) development. If you’re interested, get in touch! Be sure to include links to your previous work. If you’re studying at a Dutch college right now, you might start seeing this flyer (PDF, in Dutch) hanging around soon.

Some other stuff is coming your way soon, like the Linux tracker and a big update to user profiles. Plus: always wanted to know how we spot software trends and do some in-depth analysis on our data? Incoming!

We’re always working on cool new stuff, and listening to you via our blog or Get Satisfaction, but now we’ve made this short survey to ask all of you some more specific questions.

Surveys are always a bit of a hassle, so we’ve done our best to ask as little as needed. We have just two pages of questions for you, and it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to fill out. To sweeten the deal a bit, we’re also giving away 5 Wakoopa t-shirts to random users that filled in the survey.

Take the Wakoopa survey 2009

Don’t forget to tell your friends to take the survey as well! All answers will contribute to making Wakoopa more awesome in the future.

As you may have noticed, the Wakoopa site is currently unreachable. This is due to a server failure at our hosting provider. We’re currently working with their engineers to move to a new server. We don’t have an estimated time for this, but keep an eye out on this blog for updates.

Update: we’re up again! Thanks for your patience.