Author: gubatron

FrostWire 6.0.1 released. Available now for download.

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We can proudly say this is the leanest, and fastest FrostWire release we’ve ever made, and we’re only getting started with the performance improvements.

Download it now for free from the Official FrostWire Website:

Windows installer
MacOSX installer (64-bit)
Ubuntu (.deb) installer (64-bit)
RPM installer (64-bit)
TAR.GZ installer (64-bit)

The most fundamental upgrade about the 6.x series is the complete removal of the Azureus Torrent engine, we’ve replaced it with frostwire-jlibtorrent, a Java wrapper of the powerful libtorrent library.

The performance benefits are very palpable on search, downloads and other aspects of the application.

Having Libtorrent under the hood will allow us to continue working on the enablement of advanced features for expert BitTorrent users.

We’d like to invite everyone out there to benchmark FrostWire 5.7.7 against FrostWire 6.0.0 and let us know what they find, we’d love to make FrostWire 6 superior in every respect to the FrostWire 5 series.

HELP WANTED
Contributors are needed to keep moving the project forward at a faster face, we are now converting donations received into bitcoins which are deposited into a “Tip for commit” fund. All the contributions accepted into the project automatically trigger tips to the authors in bitcoins.

Anybody can help, you don’t need a bank account, or paypal account to receive your tips, all you need is a free Bitcoin wallet which is software you can download to your smartphone or PC, tips are effective immediatly after contributions are merged to the frostwire-desktop, frostwire-common, frostwire-jlibtorrent, and frostwire-android projects.

FULL CHANGELOG

frostwire (6.0.0) stable; urgency=high

PERFORMANCE:

  • New BitTorrent engine based on frostwire-jlibtorrent, a libtorrent wrapper api created by FrostWire.
  • Fixes EzTV search, now with https support.
  • Multiple bug fixes.
  • Improved OS event handling in MacOSX.
  • Extensive cleanup.
  • Fixes issues opening .torrents and magnets outside of FrostWire.

USER INTERFACE:

  • Icons, buttons and other user interface details refreshed.

TRANSLATIONS:

— FrostWire Team contact@frostwire.com Mon, 10 November 2014 18:18:00 -0500

FrostWire 6.0.0 running on Ubuntu Linux

FrostWire 6.0.0 running on MacOSX

Preliminary DOWNLOADING performance improvements of FrostWire 6 (pre-release)

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FrostWire 6 downloading performance improvements over FrostWire 5

While downloading 15 simultaneous BitTorrent transfers we’ve observed peak CPU usage to be drop about 44% from in comparison to the usage level seen in FrostWire 5.7.7.

Memory usage also sees a drop of 16% while downloading.

The number of live threads has been reduced 60%.

The number of classes loaded in memory has been reduced 27%.

Memory usage has dropped to ~50%

Live threads

Loaded classes

These tests were performed on a MacBook Air, 1.7GHz Intel Core i5, 4Gb 1333 MHz DDR3 of memory running on OSX 10.9.5.

Please Test and compare FrostWire 6 to FrostWire 5 for yourself.

We’d like to invite people passionate about testing software performance and let us know what they find independently.

We’d rather be validated by non related third parties on the fact that FrostWire 6 is a superior file sharing client than its predecessor.

FrostWire Source Code:
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-desktop
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-jlibtorrent
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-common

Preliminary SEARCH performance improvements of FrostWire 6 (beta) vs 5.7.7

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Here are some results from internal performance testing between FrostWire 5.7.7 and the latest beta build for FrostWire 6.0.x

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 2.16.09 PM

CPU usage on search has been reduced almost by 2/3rds, search experience should be significantly better, specially on older machines which had a hard time using FrostWire.

Memory usage while searching has been reduced up to a 50%.

The Peak number of threads is now 41% of FrostWire 5’s.

And we’ve gotten rid of over 2,000 classes, and we keep getting leaner and leaner as we prepare for the first release candidate.

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 2.23.51 PM

Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 2.23.39 PM

These tests were performed on a MacBook Air, 1.7GHz Intel Core i5, 4Gb 1333 MHz DDR3 of memory running on OSX 10.9.5.

Soon we’ll have results on an older machine running Windows XP.

Please Test and compare FrostWire 6 to FrostWire 5 for yourself.

We’d like to invite people passionate about testing software performance and let us know what they find independently.

We’d rather be validated by non related third parties on the fact that FrostWire 6 is a superior file sharing client than its predecessor.

FrostWire Source Code:
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-desktop
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-jlibtorrent
http://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-common

FrostWire 6.0.0 build 1 (alpha) installers available – New BitTorrent engine based on frostwire-jlibtorrent

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http://dl.frostwire.com/frostwire/6-alpha/frostwire-6.0.0-alpha-build-1.windows.exe
http://dl.frostwire.com/frostwire/6-alpha/frostwire-6.0.0-alpha-build-1.dmg

PLEASE REPORT ALL BUGS HERE
app_splash

Changelog
frostwire (6.0.0) unstable; urgency=high

* New BitTorrent engine based on frostwire-jlibtorrent, a

libtorrent wrapper api created by FrostWire.

* Russian translation updates.

* Multiple bug fixes.

— FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com>  Thu, 09 October 2014 23:58:07 -0500

Let us know if you feel any difference when searching, downloading torrents and magnets.

(Ubuntu/Linux binary coming soon, we’re also working on similar upgrades for Android, currently testing pre-alpha on it)

New FrostWire 5.7.7 available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Contributors now earn bitcoins instantaneously.

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Download FrostWire 5.7.7 for Windows (Bitcoin enabled .torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.7 for MacOSX (.torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.7 for Debian/Ubuntu (.torrent)

This update focuses on fixing multiple user interface issues, mostly related to the media player. Libraries were updated, a nasty freeze when opening FrostWire out of a magnet link has finally been fixed, and new linux collaborators have given some love to our codebase.

Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 9.50.11 AM

Like on Android, you can now fully stop the player
by long pressing the Play/Pause player button.

FrostWire now has a new feature in which it tries to detect wether or not you are using a VPN connection to warn you about the possibility of your privacy being at risk.

We recommend that whenever you are online you connect to the internet using an encrypted VPN connection to protect your identity and your privacy.

Build & Fix FrostWire, get paid in Bitcoins immediatly
If you are a developer/translator/graphic designer, you should know that now you can earn bitcoins when your patches and contributions are merged to the master branches of our open source projects on github.

You will automatically receive Bitcoins in your Bitcoin wallet, you just need to have a github account and a tip4commit account where you can register your Bitcoin wallet address. Payments are sent within minutes of your patches being merged.

FrostWire Bitcoin donations are being diverted into our main open source projects frostwire-desktop, frostwire-android, frostwire-common and frostwire-jlibtorrent.

Each merged commit gets 1% of what’s left on each fund.

Preparing for FrostWire 6

We are hard at work on the next generation of FrostWire 6, if you paid attention to the names of our repositories, or if you follow this blog, you may have read about the frostwire-jlibtorrent project. We have made a full featured Java wrapper API out of the C++ libtorrent library and the results of our tests have been phenomenal. We’re currently replacing all of our Bittorrent core for one that uses libtorrent and we’re pretty sure you will feel the difference.

Join the FrostWire Beta Testers group to help us release a steady FrostWire 6.

Changelog

frostwire (5.7.7) stable; urgency=high
  * New: VPN connection status indicator.
  * New: Stop media playback by long pressing play/pause button.
  * Fix: Freeze when opening FrostWire from the first time out of
    clicking on a magnet link or .torrent file.
  * Fix: Bug where files couldn't be played with the main player button.
  * Fix: Bug where the speaker icon on the library would still show
    after the media player had stopped.
  * Fix: Bug after 5.7.5 in which the buttons of the Create Torrent
    dialog were not visible unless the window was resized.
  * Fixes issue on Linux when player window pixel translucency could
    not be set. Thanks @foutrelis.
  * Fixes Null Pointer Exception when trying to shutdown and hide
    an MPlayerWindow that may have not been instantiated.
  * Fixes issue where user could not create new playlist by dropping
    songs from existing playlist into 'New Playlist' list item in
    the library.
  * Updated MigLayout source code to version 4.0

 -- FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com>  Wed, 01 October 2014 17:00:00 -0500

Introducing frostwire-jlibtorrent, a Java based libtorrent wrapper API by the makers of FrostWire

~ gubatron ~ 6 Comments

Thanks to the swig project, we’ve been able to create a full blown Java wrapping API for the C++ libtorrent library*, we’ve called it frostwire-jlibtorrent.

This means that now, the power of libtorrent is now accesible to millions of Java programmers around the world who wish to harness decentralized file sharing for any kind of BitTorrent client or enterprise deployment using BitTorrent and Java without the hassle of dealing with JNI or JNA frameworks themselves.

We’ve made sure not to alienate any developers from using frostwire-jlibtorrent in their projects by licensing the source code under The MIT License.

We hope the enterprise world can make use of these libraries, specially for large scale cloud deployments via BitTorrent that may require complex and rich logic tied to existing Java code bases.

We make this announcement as we’re close to finishing the next generation of FrostWire, FrostWire 6. frostwire-jlibtorrent is still under development, and it will continue to be actively developed as the libtorrent team (a very active team) continues to release updates and as we keep updating and enhancing the FrostWire BitTorrent client.

As we develop the new FrostWire 6, switching to frostwire-jlibtorrent as our BitTorrent engine has resulted in incredible performance upgrades which have translated into almost instant download start times, faster downloads, CPU usage reductions of up to 80% when actively downloading torrents, faster DHT magnet torrent info fetching, faster deep torrent search, decreased use of threads and memory, and incredibly faster app shutdown times. We can’t wait to finish FrostWire 6 for you to give frostwire-jlibtorrent a spin.

libtorrent coming to a language near you

By using swig, we’ve now opened the path for not just having java bindings for libtorrent, we’ll now be able to create bindings for other programming languages like Perl, PHP, Tcl, Ruby, C#, Lua and Python**.

We’ll probably be making Python the next libtorrent wrapper as we’d like to bring the power of libtorrent’s DHT to other important open source projects, and we hope the Open source community will join us into porting this project to every language possible to further the use of BitTorrent as a decentralizing technology.

Team FrostWire
September 24, 2014

* frostwire-jlibtorrent is currently compatible with libtorrent-rasterbar-1.0.2.

** we are aware that libtorrent comes with python bindings already, but our wrappers, in our opinion will be more pleasurable to code with

Welcome to the new FrostWire.com

~ gubatron ~ 3 Comments

As promised a lean, clean, beautiful, fast website has been launched today at http://www.frostwire.com
You can enjoy it from your desktop or mobile phone starting now.

If you find any broken links or issues with the new website please report them to support@frostwire.com or send us a tweet.

Screenshot of the new FrostWire.com - September 2014

Designed and developed by Marcelina Knitter with engineering and performance assistance from Angel Leon.

We are getting Lean

~ gubatron ~ 1 Comment

We’re in the process of becoming leaner and leaner, a new lighter and faster website, a lighter installer, a lighter memory footprint, faster IO, leaner than ever before. Preparing FrostWire 6 for you.

New FrostWire 5.7.6 with improved search result filters and cloud search.

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Download FrostWire 5.7.6 for Windows (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin enabled .torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.6 for MacOSX (.torrent)
Download FrostWire 5.7.6 for Debian/Ubuntu (.torrent)

This new FrostWire release improves the Search Tools filters, now you can filter search results by the file type, or by the name of the download source, for instance, if you just want to browse through .mp3 search results, open Search Tools and type “mp3” and you will see only mp3 search results. If you just want to see search results from “Archive.org”, now you don’t need to uncheck all the sources, you just type “archive” and it will filter out everything that doesn’t come from Archive.org.

Screen Shot 2014-08-25 at 6.12.16 PM

Changelog

frostwire (5.7.6) stable; urgency=high
  * New: Filter search results by file extension, source name.
  * UI: Now table rows have a subtle bevel effect.
  * UI: Adds support for full screen mode on Mac OSX. Thanks to Tim Farris.
        
 -- FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com>  Thu, 21 August 2014 23:53:35 -0500

 

FrostWire is a free, open source BitTorrent client first released in September 2004, as afork of LimeWire. It was initially very similar to LimeWire in appearance and functionality, but over time developers added more features, including BitTorrent support. In version 5,Gnutella support was dropped entirely, and FrostWire is only a BitTorrent client. Development of the program has been active since the program was first released in September 2004.

Don’t like Eclipse? Prefer IntelliJ Idea for Java Programming? FrostWire for Desktop is now IntelliJ ready

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logo_intellij_idea

As of today, when you clone the frostwire-desktop github repository, you can now work from IntelliJIdea and build it right of.

Just make sure you put the following on the VM Options of the Application’s Run/Debug Configuration:

-Djava.library.path=lib/native

Screen Shot 2014-08-22 at 9.27.57 AM

FrostWire is a free, open source BitTorrent client first released in September 2004, as a fork of LimeWire. It was initially very similar to LimeWire in appearance and functionality, but over time developers added more features, including BitTorrent support. In version 5, Gnutella support was dropped entirely, and FrostWire is only a BitTorrent client. Development of the program has been active since the program was first released in September 2004.