FrostWire Wins 2nd Place at Miami Bitcoin Hackathon with decentralized shopping marketplace

This weekend our 2 lead developers spent 28 hours hacking away to bring home the silver at the Miami Bitcoin Hackathon organized by BitStop and Blockchain Beach.

hackathon-2nd-place

FrostWire’s project was built using the frostwire-jlibtorrent library and the Bitpay API to create a proof of concept for a p2p shopping marketplace called Seller.Trade on which customers pay with bitcoins.

Seller.Trade home page

End users just need a Bitcoin wallet to pay and web browser to search for products available, and sellers run a server side p2p app that connects to other sellers that participate in the network using the BitTorrent Mainline DHT. Nodes help route searches and products announced.

Seller.Trade search result page

We intend to create a binary release for Linux servers in the coming weeks and see where this experiment takes us.

SellerTrade product page

The project is very simple and it allows anyone in the planet to start their own store on line and accept Bitcoin payments, with the twist, that all the stores are connected to each other using a combination of the Mainline DHT we use for decentralized torrent tracking and an HTTP Rest API.

Check out our presentation to the judges (We finished early and made a video to not leave the presentation to improvisation and Murphy’s whims, and also so the world could see it anytime later on)

And here’s us accepting the prize (In bitcoins of course)

and now it will be in front of our desk to make us proud 🙂

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question… since you’re still reading all the way down here.

Would you like to see FrostWire yield search results of products that you could buy with Bitcoin?

Would you like to sell things using your own store server without paying any listing or comission fees?

Should we make Seller.Trade into a real world product?

New FrostWire for Android, now with full featured Music Player

Get FrostWire for Android Now

After 4 years of fun and hard work we finally have a version of FrostWire for Android that starts to get close to our vision.

On this release we’ve finally put together a very stable BitTorrent and Cloud Downloader along with a FULL FEATURED music player for your phone/tablet.

What you see below is a graph that shows the number of reported crashes for the past 6 months, look at how it drops dramatically these last couple of weeks after the 1.4.x releases start to come out.

Screen Shot 2014-12-25 at 11.12.02 AM

Please keep those reviews coming.

Here are some screenshots of the new music player we’ve included:
new-player-03
New “My Music” section on the main navigation menu.

Now you will be able to browse your music by Album, Artist, Songs, Genre and you will be able to organize your music in Android music Playlists, which should be available on other music player apps, so if you already had some playlists on your android you’ll be able to play them and manage them with FrostWire.

New FrostWire Music Player

Here’s a full list of the changes on FrostWire 1.4:


FrostWire 1.4.2 - DECEMBER/22/2014
- New: Music Player (forked out of Apollo Player).
- New: Playlist support.
- New: Browse music by Recent, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres.
- New: Change cover art on Playlists, Songs.
- New: Shuffle All music.
- Torrent/Magnet caching improvements reduce the number of DHT
requests when searching, which makes search result parsing faster
in most cases.
- When sharing files from 3rd party apps with FrostWire, the file
shared will be displayed by FrostWire as available via Wi-Fi sharing.
If the file is a .torrent the torrent transfer will start.
- Not using wifi multicast lock for energy savings.
- 'Preferences' renamed to 'Settings'
- About activity moved out of navigation menu and into Settings screen.
- Audio files can now be set as ringtones from My Files > Audio.
- Settings screen rearrangement.


FrostWire 1.4.1 - DECEMBER/02/2014
- Updated jlibtorrent binaries.
- Resilience to file disk permission errors causing the app to
not start in some environments.
- Improved disk I/O when persisting states of torrent transfers.
- Refactors, Cleanups and other misc. bug fixes.
- Improved user experience on transfer list actions.
- Preferences screen won't automatically kick user to search screen
when BitTorrent connectivity changes.


FrostWire 1.4.0 - NOVEMBER/08/2014
- Replaced Vuze Bittorrent engine for frostwire-jlibtorrent,
a java wrapper to the native libtorrent BitTorrent library.
- Peak memory usage dropped 50% when searching.
- Peak memory usage dropped 16% when downloading torrents.
- Number of threads dropped 41% when searching.
- Number of threads dropped 60% when downloading torrents.
- Peak CPU usage dropped 66% when searching.
- Peak CPU usage dropped 44% when downloading torrents.
- Got rid of over 2,000 classes.
- New Shutdown feature, stops all services and activities,
FrostWire process ends gracefully.
- Upgraded Picasso library to 2.4.0.
- More responsive and stable torrent state handling experience.
- Torrent downloads start faster.
- Torrent downloads connect to more peers.
- Updated German translation.
- Updated Croatian translation.
- Updated Polish translation.
- Updated Spanish translation.
- Updated Russian translation.
- Gets rid of Transcommu.
- Project is now built using gradle script.
- Updated Preferences screen BitTorrent connection status button.
- Fixes severe startup crash on Samsung Galaxy Mini devices.
- Multiple bug fixes and crashes.

4200491616_c322b85387
Merry Xmas everybody!
Team FrostWire

FrostWire for Android 1.4.1 (build 154) out

Download FrostWire 1.4.1 build 154 binaries and source code from github

frostwire-android-armeabi-v7a-release.apk
frostwire-android-arm64-v8a-release.apk
frostwire-android-armeabi-release.apk
frostwire-android-x86-release.apk
frostwire-android-x86_64-release.apk
frostwire-android-mips-release.apk
frostwire-android-mips64-release.apk

Periodic user interface freeze on Windows FIXED.

A portion of the Windows userbase was experiencing a periodic freeze every few seconds in the user interface after upgrading to FrostWire 6.0.2.

We discovered it was a bug that was introduced in the boost libraries after 1.56.

In order to fix this issue, please upgrade your FrostWire to 6.0.3 or later.

10809860_738464776239739_714007594_n – Photo by @matthew_brink

FrostWire 6.0.3 changelog

Download FrostWire 6.0.3

frostwire (6.0.3) stable; urgency=high
  * Solves issue getting correct single file location from transfer manager.
  * Improved MD5 verification. Thanks @abderraouf-adjal
  * Important UI transfer related actions restored for Linux users.
  * Updated frostwire-jlibtorrent libraries,
    now built with older Boost 1.55, fixes Windows UI Freeze issue.
  * CPU usage reduced managing transfer items.
  * Croatian, Bulgarian, Polish, translation updates.
  * More cleanups and refactors.

 -- FrostWire Team   Wed, 3 December 2014 16:53:57 -0500

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.

FrostWire 6.0.2 changelog

Download FrostWire from the official website

This is a hotfix release to address complains about the default settings along with other minor issues we've fixed since the last release.

frostwire (6.0.2) stable; urgency=high
* Maximum concurrent torrent download settings defaults raised to 10.
* KAT search fix.
* Prevents possible out of memory error.
* Croatian translation update.
* Minor refactors

— FrostWire Team <contact@frostwire.com> Wed, 19 November 2014 16:26:00 -0500

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.

FrostWire 6.0.1 changelog

ForstWire 6.0.1 is now Available at http://www.frostwire.com for Windows, Mac and Linux


frostwire (6.0.1) stable; urgency=high
* Fixes YouTube download Error.
* Updated splash screen.
* Misc. bugs.

TRANSLATIONS:
* Croatian translation updates. Thanks @win32re, @darthxjanus.
* Polish translation updates. Thanks @nalesnikld, @paulinka.
* Spanish translation updates.

-- FrostWire Team Mon, 17 November 2014 14:16:00 -0500

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.

FrostWire 6.0.1 released. Available now for download.

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)

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

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