replicator.org ... continuous garbage collection

Though I made a two week detour to create a small Silverlight based graph editor, SharedSafe is progressing well and we are finally glad to announce another alpha release. Yes, I know, we planned get into the beta phase weeks ago, but because the Website is not ready yet, it may take another two weeks until we start the private beta. I am sorry for that, but we want to base everything on solid ground.

So what is new?

Some time ago we decided to change the terminology to reflect in a more logical sense what it means to connect local Folders with remote IMAP Folders. We changed the following:

• A Store is now a Safe
• A local folder, that is synchronized with a Safe, is now a Linked Folder
• An exported Safe (a file suffixed with “.sharedsafe”) is now called a SafeKey, and the file extension is also “.safekey”.
  So if you have exported safes lying around, just rename them from *.sharedsafe to *.safekey.

Based on the new terminology, we implemented a new set of Explorer context menus:

Create Safe and link to Folder will present you with options to create a new Safe and immediately links the Safe to the selected folder. If the folder already contains files, they will be uploaded immediately.

With Link Folder to Safe you can either choose an already existing Safe or import a Safe from a *.safekey file and link it to the selected folder. If the local folder already contains files, the contents are combined with the Safe’s files.

After a folder has been linked to a Safe, it gets marked with our SharedSafe overlay icon. Now two different menus appear:

Share Safe exports the linked Safe into a *.safekey file which you may send to friends to share the Files in the Safe.

Unlink Folder from Safe detaches the local folder from the remote Safe. No files are deleted in this process.

We think that these changes make SharedSafe much more understandable and usable.

And to explain the context menus to new users, we completely changed the Application Launcher:

So what is next:

The next thing we do is to start the private beta phase. We need to introduce a new license type and the Website is missing some minor graphical changes. Legal preparations are mostly done, and of course there are lots of cosmetical things to do (the setup is looking very ugly yet), but these are by no means showstoppers.

If you are interested in a private beta invitation, follow SharedSafe on Twitter or Facebook.