FrostWire for Android 0.5.1, now with 3G/4G support

Download FrostWire for Android

The top request by the FrostWire for Android community was being able to use the application outside a WiFi network, wel the first version with 3G/4G support is finally available.

This new release brings a few new Features like “Send File To Chat”, you will also notice subtle but useful changes to the User Interface and User Experience.

After FrostWire 0.5.x, we’ll be dropping support for older Androids still running 1.6. According to our stats only 4% of the network was running 1.6 and this 4% was holding back the rest from some great ideas we had in the beginning on how to use multitouch, gestures and other features of Android +2.1. Other than that we believe Androids running newer versions of the operating system will handle the p2p networking technology a lot better.

Many more to come during the 0.5.x series, please report all bugs, crashes and give us your feedback on how to make the application better.

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Here’s the full changelog for 0.5.1:

FrostWire 0.5.0:
– New Feature: 3G/4G support. Use FrostWire outside your Wi-Fi network.
– New Feature: Send file(s) to chat. Long press on a file or select many, then send to the chatroom.
– UI-love: Updated look of Screen Headers. Tabs and Headers have new gradient looks and look well across all devices.
Better looking buttons on Transfers screen.
– UI-fix: Updated “Love FrostWire” section. No more donations until we integrate payment system.
Please rate us 5 stars on the Android Market if you like the app instead.
– UX-upgrade: Distances to peers now shown in both miles and kilometers (by popular demand)
– UX-upgrade: Peer Browsing is more frugal in screen real-state. Good for small screens.
– Drops support for Android 1.6 to favor health of the network with faster/better peers.
– Bug-fix: Fixes several reported (NPE) crashes.

Warning
Make sure you know your carrier rules regarding the use of P2P applications since you might be breaching your carrier contract by using this app in some countries. Also make sure you don’t leave FrostWire for Android running for a long time if you have a limited data transfer plan since you might exceed your plan limits.

FrostWire condemns Piracy

Since the FrostWire project started the FrostWire Team and community have worked hard to show the potential of p2p file-sharing as a legitimate and convenient mechanism of content delivery that can level the playing field for content creators all over the world who are willing to share some of their content for free.

We designed and built FrostWire for Android thinking of how the world should be, before FrostWire for Android the most social device by nature (your phone) was crippled when it came to connecting with people near you, it was a great device for remote interaction (email, phone, web browsing, tweeting, blogging) but not for close range interaction. Now you can connect and share one of the most precious assets in your mobile device with those around you, your files.

P2P filesharing will evolve as a content distribution model, we think there’s been plenty of schooling about illegal downloading over the world, we want to school the world on what legal file sharing is, specially in regards to music when you have over 8 million bands and singers in sites like myspace willing to share their music and be discovered, p2p is perfect for them.

We created FrostWire for Android initially for close range file sharing having in mind use cases like:

  • Groups of Friends and family sitting at the dinner table in a restaurant who are usually “texting”, tweeting and being disconnected from what’s in front of them. Now they have another way to interact with the people in front of them, they can exchange pictures, videos of earlier in the day and not be so technologically alienated. No need to have a rain check on that video you recorded of your friends hours earlier in the club, you can exchange the recently recorded memories while you’re having a slice of pizza at 3am on that open Wi-Fi of the pizzeria
  • Conferences and classrooms. Speakers can now share materials with the audience right from the phone, no need to give an URL for later, just grab the presentation, or the video, or the pictures, or the podcast related to the talk from my phone, right now.
  • Parents with smartphones usually have hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures and videos of their kids. You can now easily send in a short amount of time all those pictures and videos to your friends and family, more over, you can now share these files across all the android devices you have at home, think of tablets and tvs.
  • You’re part of an indie band and you want to share a few free tracks with your live audience, whip out your Android and tell the audience to start downloading those demo tracks right now, create buzz around your band after the show is over.
  • You are a shy person, you find yourself in a room full of hundreds of people, there’s an open Wi-Fi network, start FrostWire and see who’s around, the Chat is a great way to break the ice with other shy people around you.
  • Use FrostWire to promote your free Android Apps. FrostWire will only share Apps the user has installed and which are not copy protected (this also gives a level of protection against malware, you can’t just share malicious .apk files unless you have installed them on your own phone/device).
  • Search and Download thousands of Free Apps. You’ll actually see what people has installed on their phones, not some reviews or sketchy numbers on a website.
  • Sending files Wirelessly between your Android devices and PCs. FrostWire is a great way to transfer all the videos and pictures taken with your Smartphone into your computer without any hassle.

FrostWire 4.21.5 – Huge update out

After this update you will have a more robust, safer, faster and leaner FrostWire.

Better BitTorrent Support
The biggest upgrades done to this release address proper integration with the Azureus core. FrostWire is no longer a leech of the bittorrent network, when you restart FrostWire it will try to seed previous torrents you have downloaded and not removed, this will make the bittorrent network a lot healthier and we won’t risk having FrostWire banned from torrent trackers.

DHT Support
With the last Mac release we upgraded the Mojito DHT codebase and all FrostWire’s will now connect to it. The Mojito DHT will help FrostWire yield better results, protect itself from spam, and provide more nodes to this open DHT which can be used for many other purposes.

Cleaner Search Results with improved Spam Filters
We also went in the code base and removed a lot of never to be used code from the LimeWire codebase that will make loading time faster and memory use slightly lower. Also a lot of work went into the FrostWire spam filter, make sure you mark spam results as junk so FrostWire will learn what’s spam and what’s not.

FrostWire 5 coming this year
If there are no major issues with this release, we’ll probably release one or two more maintenance updates while we keep working on the next generation of FrostWire. We don’t plan on making any radical changes to the user experience since we don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, however we know it needs a make over. For this we have already gotten rid of the current skinning system and integrated the substance skinning project to a branch of FrostWire which you can already try if you like running FrostWire from source.

Here’s the full changelog in geek speak:

* New setting to turn off automatic installer downloads.
* New setting to limit the speed of BitTorrent downloads.
* New Galician flag added.
* UX improvements when creating new folders on the Phones and Tablets UI.
* Fixes bug when dropping files on an Android device that hasn’t been
selected.
* UX change. FrostWire will now seed torrents that have not been removed
from it’s download manager. Completed torrents now will appear as
“Completed/Seeding”
* UX change. Default save location folder in Windows Vista and Windows7 is
now the user’s default “~Downloads/FrostWire” folder.
* UX improvements when showing FrostClick overlays. No more flickering.
Overlays are now shown in an animated slideshow. More than 2 artists
can now be promoted.
* Fixes bug when copying .apk files from Android device to desktop computer.
* Fixes bug when saving torrents to it’s default Save location if that
folder has been deleted.
* Fixes bug on which removed Torrent downloads would reappear.
* Updated Mojito DHT integration. Mojito DHT is now active.
* Upgraded anti-spam mechanisms.
* Removed all remnant code related to LimeWire Store.
* Cleanup to use a single logging library.
* Fixes newly introduced bug where it would not recursively share the
files in a folder. Thanks File_Girl71.
* Fixes newly introduced bug where it wouldn’t correctly display the
title of a file on the Playlist.
* Fixes issue where it would not kill torrent uploads until
the next restart.
* Fixes NPE on HttpFetcher.fetch()

And here’s a collage of all the pictures sent by you that made it to the new splash screens

And if you’re an Android user you might want to check out our latest version, also released this week and getting a lot of positive feedback from users in the Android Market.

FrostWire Splash Screen Gallery – Vol VI

FrostWire Splash Screens for 4.21.x

Credits and more detailed descriptions of these pictures are available on the Flickr Group.

Submitting your pictures

If you want your picture to make it to the next FrostWire, join the FrostWire Photo Album Flickr Group and submit your pictures. Here are some tips to get your picture on the FrostWire splash screen:

  • Send us pictures of your FrostWire Stickers or Shirts. Get Free Stickers here, we ship worldwide.
  • The Higher the resolution the better.
  • Horizontal pictures work better for the Splash Screen.
  • Make sure you tell us where in the world you took the picture. If there’s a funny story related to the picture please share that on the description.
  • Tag your pictures. Some suggested “tags” for your pictures are: frostwire, filesharing, p2p, gnutella, bittorrent, frostwire stickers, frostwire.com

New FrostWire for Android 0.4.24

On this new release you can expect better connectivity (even from behind some firewall configurations) and a more responsive UI due to better resource management and a rewrite of our connectivity management, which was re-architected to support 3G and 4G connections (After we test this version, we’ll be getting closer to a release that will be able to use your 3G/4G connection)

FrostWire 0.4.24
– Core-Upgrade: Socket management rewritten to connect behind most firewall configurations (almost ready for 3G/4G support)
– Core-Upgrade: Rewrite of Application Provider.
– UX-Upgrade: Internationalization: French Support (i18n).
– UX-Upgrade: When browsing your own apps you now see their corresponding icons.
– UX-Upgrade: New setting to control vibration notifications upon finished downloads.
– Bug-fix: Crash when opening an old notification if the app wasn’t running.
– Bug-fix: Copying .apk files from the phone to the desktop didn’t work.
– Bug-fix: Possible search result filtering Exception fixed. Better search results for the network.
– Bug-Fix: Fixes obscure FC when starting a batch download then hitting the Back button right away.
– Bug-Fix: Fixes I/O bug that should result in less “Waiting…” cases when browsing peers.
– UI-Fix: Smoother scrolling and updating of Peer list.

Get it now at frostwire.com/android or on the android market.

FrostWire Source Package distribution ready – Ubuntu/Debian Sponsors wanted

Download the source packages

A new Debian Guideline compliant Source Package is finally ready for Linux repository mantainers to build official FrostWire binaries and finally have FrostWire included as part of your favorite Linux distribution or at least have it available in the repository of your Linux distro.

With FrostWire 4.21.3 for Linux we have finally achieved complete architecture independence, FrostWire for Linux is a 100% Java GPL application.

This source package includes every single line of code of every third party library used in FrostWire.

We will be distributing on every release from now on the following files:

frostwire_x.y.z.orig.tar.gz (ALL sources, useful for non Debian based linux mantainers)
frostwire_x.y.z.debian.tar.gz (All Debian specific files required to build the frostwire debian package)
frostwire_x.y.z.dsc (Debian source control file)

We are looking for a friendly repository sponsors/maintainers/uploaders that are willing to take the next step of grabbing our source package and building the binaries that could be included in every official package repository of every major Linux distribution.

Thanks to the #ubuntu-motu folks for their patience and guiding during this process.

How to build a .deb package on a Debian based distro

You will need the following packages installed:
Download the source packages

ant, libgnome2-dev, libxt-dev, maven2, default-jdk, python, zlib1g, libc6, libgcc1, libacl1-dev, javahelper

Build like this:

$ #extract the sources
$ dpkg-source -x frostwire_x.y.z.dsc
$ cd frostwire-x.y.z
#build the package
$ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rsudo

New FrostWire for Android out (0.4.23)


This is a big one fellas.

This release fixes a nasty bug where Applications files were not being shared (relief)

The Peer list is now ordered by distance (closer peers appear on top, you should be always on top), other peers that don’t say where they are go towards the bottom sorted alphabetically.

4 nasty crashes were fixed.

Spanish Support. More translations are coming in further releases.

We added back the “Search” button to search since Android’s keyboards tend to behave differently and lots of people complained about not having an explicit Search button.

FrostWire for Desktop Compatible

If you update to this release you will be able to transfer files to your desktop without any cables.
(You will need FrostWire for Desktop +4.21.2 to be released anytime this week, stay tuned to our twitter feed if you want to try it before the rest)

Here’s the formal changelog:

FrostWire 0.4.23
– UX-Upgrade: Internationalization: Spanish Support (i18n).
– Bug-Fix: Issue where apps were not being shared.
– Core-Upgrade: Support for file transfers to FrostWire for Desktop > 4.21.2
– UI-Fix: Search results you started downloading appear in blue without having to scroll.
– UI-Upgrade: Peers appear sorted by Geo-Distance if available, otherwise alphabetically by nickname.
– UI-Upgrade: Core message handling optimizations for faster UI response.
– Bug-Fix: 4 commonly reported crashes fixed.

Also stay tuned also for some video faq’s to start washing aways any myths on how the application works. We’ll be putting this in our youtube channel and you’ll be able to get them easily from frostwire.com

FrostWire’s source code repository is now Mercurial (Hosted by BitBucket.org)


The latest source code and development branches of FrostWire have moved from SourceForge.net to BitBucket.org.

The address of the project’s source code on bitbucket is http://bitbucket.org/frostwire/frostwire.desktop

For simplicity we just did a new import of the last trunk found in sourceforge.net. This means that the new repository has no history before the initial import. If you need to review hacks done in the past you’ll have to browse the old subversion repository which will remain to exist for as long as sourceforge.net allows.

We’ll still use sourceforge.net as one of our distribution channels, specially for the new Debian Source Packages (dsc, tar.gz) which are almost ready for showtime, hopefully the Ubuntu mantainers will help us get in their package repositories.

Props to the Bitbucket.org and Sourceforge.net teams for such great free services.

Try FrostWire for Android in the Airport/Plane this holiday season


Get FrostWire for your Android

That’s a picture of FrostWire for Android running on two phones and connected to the Open WiFi network near the gate at the airport.

Please give it a try on public networks and let us know what the experience will be like (it’s hard to find public networks that don’t isolate peers for security reasons and FrostWire won’t work in these cases).

If you’re in an airport and the WiFi is not free or it won’t work, please try creating your own android WiFi hotspot and testing how FrostWire will work when one phone is the hotspot.

What better time to share the pictures and videos of your holidays than during the wait for your flight back home or at 30,000 feet while you’re bored flying back? Wouldn’t it be cool to chat with other passengers and break the ice?

New FrostWire for Android 0.4.19

The picture above shows how FrostWire for Android 0.4.19 addresses a privacy issue some users and critics pointed out last week. Now when FrostWire is installed and run for the first time you will get a simple configuration screen to let you know what you’ll be sharing from the start.

On this upgrade there’s been a lot of work to make Peer Browsing a lot faster than previous versions. It also adds a few new features of the file browser and fixes some bugs our users reported last week.

Expect more updates, we follow the “release early, release often” philosophy of software development.

Changelog

FrostWire 0.4.19
– UX-Upgrade: When Browsing a peer Long Pressing on it’s name shows possible actions on the peer.
– UX-Upgrade: Fresh installs ask user about nickname and what files to share from the beginning to do away with any privacy issues.
– UX-Upgrade: Set Audio file as ringtone on Long Press.
– UX-Upgrade: Set Picture as wallpaper.
– UX-Upgrade: Clicking on the connection bars brings out the Preference Menu, for users that are not familiar with Android and looking to connect.
– UX-Fix: Copying and sharing finished downloads on the Chat now links to the copy on your phone.
– Bug-fix: Fixes issue with UDP broadcasts not being received correctly.
– Bug-fix: Fixes force close when changing nickname during application startup.
– Bug-fix: Fixes issue with negative number of shared files.
– Core-Upgrade: Faster counting of Shared/Unshared files.
– Core-Upgrade: Faster Browse responses.
– Core-Upgrade: Faster startup.
– Core-Upgrade: Faster scanning of local peers.
– Core-Upgrade: Faster shutdown.

Related Links
ZeroPaid: FrostWire for Android App Offers P2P to go

Download Squad: FrostWire for Android brings quick, slick P2P file sharing to your phone