A History of File Sharing & the Tech That Paved the Way

Since the dawning of dawn, man has shared ideas. First, ideas were shared by grunts and pointing, and then we sobered up a bit and expressed ourselves in words. Then, really bored monks in abbots, who wished they had just stayed bored when Vikings began doing Viking things to them, painstakingly wrote down words into something called the Bible by hand. Then comes the printing press, yada yada – BOOM – here’s a computer – BAM – there’s the internet. Idea sharing becomes typified as file sharing. While it has done revolutionary things for telecommunications, globalization, instantaneous sharing of ideas and history-in-the-making moments, it has also received a lot of guff for being a detractor of capitalism. Let’s take a brief look at the history of things that led to file sharing.

Scroll over the sides of the timeline to go to the next event.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Vuze 5.0 Arrives

Vuze 5.0 arrives! We’ve been working on giving greater attention to the core functionality of Vuze – finding, adding, and downloading torrents. With this in mind, we’ve made this functionality more apparent, which you’ll notice most in the changes to the UI, Sidebar, and Library view. We’ve also made some other not so apparent changes that will make it easier to access Vuze remotely and added new Tag functionality to better manage your torrenting. Here’s a detailed explanation of each and a few other updates:

Toolbar Split

Probably the most visible change is the toolbar. We’ve moved the toolbar buttons out from the top area and into the views that need and use it. We also put the two most important tasks into the global toolbar — adding torrents and searching for torrents.

Sidebar Re-Arrange

We also re-arranged the sidebar a bit. “Files” is now “My Torrents”. Since your torrents are at the heart of the client, we moved it to the very top of the list.

Content Discovery Section

We added the “Content Discovery” section which now includes all sections related to finding content. It will be home to Vuze HD Network, Subscriptions, Swarm Discoveries, and your search results.

Tags

Another new feature is Tags. Unlike Categories, tags allow you to assign the same torrent to multiple tags. Future versions of Vuze will see Tags replacing Categories all together. Tags also offer the ability for grouping on logical states (such as download states) and meta data.

Torrent Details in Library Views

Towards the bottom of the library views, we added a set of torrent details tabs. For the most part, these are the same ones you see if you right click on the torrent and choose “Show Details,” but  it now allows for quicker access to the information.

Per-download speed graph

Included in both the library views and the torrent detail view is a new speed graphic that shows the activity for a given download.

Tag speed graph

We cleaned up the tag stats view to make it easier to digest what’s active on which tags.

Peer flags by default

Where are peers? Country flags now let you know by default.

Vuze Remote UI

The Vuze Remote UI has been updated to Transmission Revision 14025 (2013/02/18).  Our last update was over two years old.  Some of the changes from the previous version include:

• Torrent Info
• Peers View
• Tracker View
• Files View with Priority Setting
• Meta Search on newer iPhones
• Android version that doesn’t show menu junk!

DHT Activity View

This new view gives a visualization of the distributed database (DHT) activity in terms of lookups, stores and a graph of the node traversal active. This is more of a Lava Lamp than anything, something to chill out to.

If you run into any issues or would like to send us some feedback, please don’t hesitate – http://forum.vuze.com

Vuze Team

More Control of Your Bandwidth

All of us at Vuze love speed, but sometimes you need to throttle it back a little, so with this release 4.9 we give you even more control of your bandwidth. We’ve added functionality to our speed-limit manager that allows transfer limits to be set on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis – and if those transfer limits are reached Vuze automatically will pause all torrents (from idea limit download or upload for a period) . We’ve also added predefined profiles in the speed-limit manager to make it super simple to block out the times of day you want your torrents running (from idea auto start and stop).  And to ensure you can always see what’s happening, we’ve added optional transfer rates and ETAs to the window title for Windows users (from idea transfer rates in title bar). Two of the other updates included in the release:

• Stream content from a Vuze client to a Vuze client (from idea allow simple streaming from Vuze to Vuze )
• Improved UI and UX for viewing meta search results and subsequent torrent details. We actually moved the torrent details to open in your browser. Vuze has had stability issues caused by embedded browser bugs (Internet Explorer please stand up) and had many suggestions to improve this, and we don’t like unhappy users

If you have any feedback please let us know – http://forum.vuze.com

Or if you you have any other ideas please visit our recommendation forum - Vote for Vuze!

The Vuze Team