clevercactus share

Congratulation to the people at clevercactus, there is now a public release of clevercactus share, described on the site as:

    clevercactus share is a private and secure environment to share files with people you know.

clevercatcus takes something we all thought we understood, namely the internet, back to basics. Make it possible for pairs/groups of people to communicate directly with each other. No need for DNS, no need for FTP servers, no need for special handling of firewalls and the like. Just secure, ad-hoc, point-to-point connections between machines out on the edge.

the technology

Its Java based [UPDATE] using their own P2P framework, not JXTA, and they have gone to great lengths to provide a quality desktop look and feel. clevercactus has both desktop and web components. The desktop component installs itself nicely into your 'whatever it is called - bottom right on windows' bar. [UPDATE] It also updates itself, like JWS, but they've done it themselves and it looks much better.

the design

I'm intrigued if they ever considered an architecture with a WebStart deployed 'share' engine which installed itself on the bar with a basic start/stop popup-menu interface and then have the engine able to project a web-interface. That way they could have unified the web+desktop components. Maybe it was an issue of expertise, they certainly have worked very hard at providing a pretty Swing interface.

the niggles

I've used two versions of 'share' to coordinate data at home and work. However my current version (v1.38 beta) seems to show up some oddities of my office environment, maybe a flakiness of the internet connection. The problem is that 'share' looses its connection and doesn't seem to be able to enable it again - maybe this version doesn't try.

wishlist

There would appear to be a trend towards people having an excess of diskspace (I'm not storing movies yet) and a surplus of connection bandwidth (at least when averaged over 24hrs). This would support an alternative mode of sharing; basically synchronising a folder amongst a group of people. Rather than have people search and pull back from a shared folder on demand, assume that everything is wanted and pull it across when it comes available. A new person joining the group would come back n hours later and find the entire folder copied over. clevercatus share already seems to do much of the complicated stuff, retrieving a folder repeatedly over a number of days seems to keep it correctly synchronized and minimises the files transferred.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for the comments Adrian--this is just to let you know that we've had other reports of the "disconnect" problem and that we're working on fixing that for the next version.

diego(PS: I'm posting "anonymously" since I don't have a blogger login)
2:05 PM
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