Queued Downloading, Search Engines, Less CPU Usage!

June 4 2008, 2:22pm

It's been a great week to be a Ringlight developer. On the website, I've added the Queue for Download option to every file. This allows you to request that a file be downloaded onto one of the machines where you are running the Ringlight client. This has some cools uses. For instance, you can download files to your home computer while you're at work, or the other way around. Very cool! Also, what do you do if you see a file you want to download, but the computer with the file is offline? Just Queue for Download and when that computer comes back online, the download will start automatically. All downloaded files go into the Downloads folder in your Ringlight shares folder. Yes, this means that by default people can see what you're downloading. If you don't want that, just mark your Downloads folder as Restricted and it will be secret.This brings up an important point that I want everyone to understand. Go look at the File Info page for any file. I've edited this page to be more informative, and it will probably say some things like "Access to this file is public to all users." and "This file is visible to search engines." You see, be default any files you share can be downloaded by anyone, and may even show up on google. Don't be scared, because this is actually very cool! You can publish things on the web just by dropping them in a folder on your computer. This is a really awesome and powerful feature, but Ringlight is for you to use however you want. If you don't want google to see your files, just click the Hide Folder option, and the folder and all the files in it will disappear from search engines. If you don't want people to download your files, just click the Restrict Folder options and then no one but you can download the files. You can make your restricted files available to certain people by publishing them to a group. Ringlight works for sharing with just yourself, just your friends, all the way up to the whole Internet. Use it how you want to use it, and let's work together to make it awesome!Speaking of awesome, topaz has reported that the Ringlight client has not been being awesome on her machine. Despite all my efforts, it's still taking up too much CPU when it scans for new files! So, I have switched to using event-based filesystem monitoring, letting the operating system inform me when there are new files. This is kind of a pain since it has to be done differently on each operating system. For now, I'm starting with Windows, but I plan to add it to OS X and Linux as well. If you're on Windows, let me know how it's going. Is Ringlight eating too much CPU on your machine?