Over the last few days we pimped our website to make it more accessible. First of all we created a screencast that shows how to share a folder with SharedSafe. Then there is a new getting started article of which we think was absolutely necessary to get new users familiar with SharedSafe. And additionally, we integrated a commenting system that offers you an additional feedback channel.

We hope you like these changes and wish you happy Christmas holidays.

We’ve had some problems with the setup and fixed most of them. So if you had installation or uninstallation problems with previous versions of SharedSafe, they should be all gone now.

Setup

SharedSafe can now be installed directly from within regular user accounts, but asks for Administrator rights to run the installation.

By default, SharedSafe installs for every user on a machine, and as soon a new user is created and logs in, SharedSafe will install itself into the new account, too.

Emailing Safe Keys

We corrected two problems with sending Safe Keys by Email: Export to an “Email recipient” now works from the context menu and the tray icon and Safe Keys can now be opened directly from an Email attachment in Thunderbird.

Outlook

Goran is preparing a video to get users started in using SharedSafe. There are some great articles about SharedSafe on the web, but we want to be sure that new users really get what’s behind “Safe Keys” and “Linked Folders” and how files can be shared quickly.

And I am continuing to work at the new synchronization engine.

Thank you for your feedback and support.

This release is mainly a bug fix release but also contains some important improvements.

GC Cache Propagation

Most importantly, we have found and fixed a problem in our garbage collection algorithm. No files were lost, but the filesystem cache of different SharedSafe installations could go out of sync, causing some internal errors and eventually made synchronizing impossible.

With this version, this problem has been fixed. After installing, the caches are automatically rebuilt and we extended the filesystem to make sure that the caches stay in sync.

Note to users with very old Safes from SharedSafe alpha builds: If you encounter unexpected conflicts, you need to upload these files again to update their Hash-Information.

Please note that once you have updated to 0.7.2382, you need to update all other clients that access the same safes.

Additionally, we improved the verification synchronization. It now rebuilds all the local caches. So if anything goes wrong, use the verification synchronization to get in sync again. In any case, please report problems back to us, so that we can improve SharedSafe.

While testing the complete resynchronization, we found out that GMail sometimes reports a temporary error “NO Some messages could not be FETCHed (Failure)”. Just wait a while, the problem should disappear after some synchronization attempts. We assume that GMail does not like the kind of IMAP request we are using to redownload all filesystem meta data.

HTTP Proxy Authentication

We’ve implemented preliminary support for authentication of HTTP Proxies. If you had troubles connecting to an IMAP server via an HTTP proxy, it should work now. If it does not, ask your system administrator if the proxy allows connecting to the IMAP ports 143 and 993.

Readonly Safes

If you used a readonly safe, SharedSafe wasn’t properly behaving when new or changed files were detected in the linked folder. With this update, new and changed files are marked as errors and redownloaded once deleted.

Shell Extension Behavior

We had a little trouble with the general behavior of the shell extension. The shell extension sometimes started SharedSafe.exe. That caused several problems, for example within a reinstallation. Now, the shell extension is completely passive and regularly checks if SharedSafe.exe is started. As soon you exit SharedSafe, all overlay icons will disappear, and as soon you start it again, the overlay icons reappear.

New Overlay Icons on Windows XP

We have not found a way to programmatically clear the Windows Explorer Icon Cache on Windows XP installations, so if the new overlay icons do not appear after a reinstallation, please check our FAQ.

We had a problem with our webserver when multiple users were accessing the website simultaneously. This caused annoying 15 second+ delays loading individual pages.

We’ve found and fixed the problem. The website should operate now without significant delays.