Wuala Blog

Last week Luzius held a presentation about Wuala Webstart at Jazoon09 - the international conference on Java technology.

In the meantime, I've stumbled across two blog postings and a tweet summarizing his presentation:

Summary: This short talk was a little confusing to follow until I realised that I was hearing about two technologies: (a) Wuala – the offline file storage solution; (b) The unique webstart implementation – which was developed in order to improve Wuala’s quality. Nevertheless, I found it quite interesting to learn of the existence of Wuala… 20 minutes well spent.

http://canoo.com/blog/2009/06/26/jazoon-09-deploying-java-apps-from-a-website

at #jazoon the #wualawebstart looks very interesting! autoupdate, fast startup, minimal prequisites and open source

http://twitter.com/stefantramm/status/2326995921

And last, but not least, some notes written by Roland Carr: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/haroldcarr/archive/2009/06/notes_from_thur_1.html

If you're interested in downloading the slides, voilà.

Labels: conference, developer zone, series, wuala webstart

We're nominated in the category "Best Entertainment Application or Service (EMEA)" at the The Europas, the technology innovation awards for European tech companies, held on July 9 in London.

That's why, we need a little help from our friends :-)

Please vote for us here: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/the-europas-best-entertainment-application-or-service-emea/

Thanks for supporting us! 

Labels: awards, techcrunch, the europas, vote

Jazoon09 - The International Conference on Java Technology - will be taking place in Zurich next week.

We're also involved: Luzius and Dominik will be holding a presentation about "Wuala Webstart: Launching a Java Application directly from a Website" on June 25 at 4.30 pm. This is what to expect:

Wuala Webstart allows to directly start a Java application from a website. In
comparison to Java's existing Webstart technology, it has much better
performance, finer update granularity and less restrictions on the used GUI
toolkit.

Find further details about the presentation here or simply register for the conference!

Labels: conference, daily life, series

In the past few weeks, we've implemented some major enhancements which resulted in a faster and better presentation of content (especially pictures) in Wuala. In this posting, I would like to present some of these improvements:

Slideshow
We use the Lightbox clone prettyPhoto for our image slideshow. An update to the latest version resulted in a noticeable speedup. Furthermore, we prefetch images: As soon as a slideshow is started, the previous and the following image in the gallery is loaded into the browser cache. Thus, browsing through your online photo gallery is much faster and more enjoyable.

Medium Version for Images
Currently we only store the original image and some thumbnails to show them within Wuala and on the website. For the website it was necessary to download the original image (between 2 and 5 MB depending on the image resolution) which was scaled down afterwards. Since the last update, Wuala additionally stores a medium version of newly inserted images (maximal size: 1024x768 pixel). The webserver can now load and serve these images much faster due to the small file size compared to the orginal image. By switching to a better shrinking algorithm, we also improved the quality of the scaled image. By the way, this additional image does not affect your storage quota - you get it for free! The medium images are generated on-the-fly for "old" images.

New Thumbnail Servers
We introduced special api servers for small thumbnails (see this example). Since these servers are not (over-)loaded by other requests (e.g. file downloads), they are very fast and responsive. Furthermore, availability is much better as there are less error sources. From a technical point of view this may not sound very groundbreaking. However, it helped us improve the overall web experience.

HTTP 206 / Partial Content Support
The latest version of the API (more precisly the contents servlet) now supports range requests. For example, this is used by the Adobe Acrobat Reader for its "Fast Web View" feature (fast browsing through a pdf even it is not yet fully loaded). The api response includes a "Accept-Ranges" header to indicate range requests are supported. The Acrobat Reader aborts now the full download and sends a particular request containing the needed byte ranges of the file (usually the current site and some more). This enables you to jump to the end of the pdf even if the file is not yet completely loaded. This feature can be used by other applications as well, e.g. video players could use it to support streaming.

You've just read the major changes we introduced during the last weeks. I'd also like to mention that we are constantly improving the core functionality to speed up the web experience.

Feel free to post your questions or ideas.

Labels: developer zone, series

Join our development team and take Wuala to the next level! We're looking for people who like getting things done, who love working in a dynamic environment, and who want to have an immediate impact.

Here are our two latest positions, we want to fill asap:

- A passionate User Interface Software Engineer
- A passionate Systems Engineer

Labels: daily life, jobs, series

Ever asked yourself: Which files have been looked at recently? Which files are trending? Which files are entertaining?

Our newest feature "Recently viewed" will answer this. With the option "recently viewed" (enable it under Tools > Options > Advanced for Win/Linux or Wuala > Preferences > Advanced for Mac ) you can see which files have been recently viewed by other users or by group members. Please note: You do not see who recently viewed the files.

Hope you like it!

Labels: effective usage, features, series

Last Friday our first Community Event took place at the Dock18 in Zurich. We were invited by Mario, who is currently organising the event series becommunity.  Aim of the series is to bring together web communities.

It was an informal evening that started off with snacks and drinks, before listening to interesting presentations about the Wuala Community itself, about Culminis, a non-profit organization devoted to the growth of the IT community, and a short lecture by Christina.

From our perspective, it was really nice getting to know some of our users personally. We really enjoyed seeing new faces and talking to you in person.  We hope you felt the same! :-) 

For those, who missed the event, don't worry!  Browse through the pictures here or wait for the next event...

Labels: community, daily life, events, series