Search
Social Stuff
Navigation

Entries in Reviews (3)

Tuesday
Mar272012

Bitcasa - Infinite Storage

Claiming to offer "infinite" storage of your files in a Dropbox like form is a bold claim but that's what Bitcasa is trying to push. The company is founded by former executives at companies like Verisign, Mastercard and Mozy.

Now they want to offer unlimited space to the masses for a proposed figure of $10 a month. That being the case, it seems like a great deal but as a user of "unlimited" offerings from others I am sceptical as to the definition of unlimited as the service prepares to go live. It is currently in alpha meaning its not ready for public use and anything outside of development purposes but give a good demonstration of the technology and how it will work.

User Interface

Bitcasa's menubar applictionWith services trying to sell "cloud" storage to the masses, the user interface (UI) is the single most important thing - a make or break moment. Most of the Bitcasa UI is mean tot be transparent like Dropbox's but it does have a few controls to allow you to actually add more folders. The idea is they have a folder manager that is accessible via an item in the menu bar or status bar. The folder user interface is laid out fairly well and intuitively and I am genuinely impressed with the UI for an alpha of a product. Its set out in a way that most people can intuitively use it without any real instructions. The installation process adds an extra item to the contextual menu (right click) allowing you to "Cloudify this...".

Functionality

Bitcasa's Folder ManagerBitcasa has tried to make the process as simple as possible to share a folder so all you have to do is go to their "My Bitcasa Folders" which will bring up a dialogue showing all your currently stored folders, their size and the current progress of files currently being sent to the cloud. The whole process to share a folder is really simple and I can see a lot of people getting to grips with it really easily once they've got the hang of what this cloud process actually does. Now unlike Dropbox, not all files are stored locally but rather a cache of frequently used files is saved locally. This is not the case in the pre-release just incase things go wrong but the idea on launch is it will delete the local copy version of the file or folder. It will just mount a special cloud folder with a saved copy (cache) of frequently used files so it wont have to constantly download a copy.

In testing this, it worked great with small folders up to around 500MB and they uploaded very quickly and no real change was noticed apart from the Bitcasa that was now showing on the folders icon. On closer inspection of the folders properties has it saying well over 500TB of available space so it was indeed "Cloudified"

Sharing of files is quite simple too. Simply right clicking on the file or folder to be shared and then clicking "Send this..." will make Bitcasa copy the file to their cloud platform and then proceed to give you a link which you can give to anyone. They person receiving doesn't have to have Bitcasa and folders are compressed as a zip file for download which is a nice touch.

Issues

Obviously this is an pre-release so most of these issues will be fixed but I still have issues with the connectivity of these services. At consumer internet speeds increase, the amount of bandwidth needed per client is increasing and I do believe this will severely affect upload speeds. Even in its current stat, I could not upload at more than 3Meg so my test of 500GB of video would take over 18 days to upload. The really disappointing thing was the tests were conducted on a line that is capable of over 200Meg upload. This may be a rate limiting system but unless your access to files is unrestricted, I believe the prosumer market is left out. 

Bitcasa uses data de-duplication of data on upload to ensure that they only store a could of instances of one file to enable low prices but consumer devices are progressively creating more and more data. I'm not sure how the exact algorithm functions but assuming my HD videos are only available on my hard drive, that's still a good 500GB of data that cannot be de-duped so I worry as to if this is available "on demand" how well it could be used.

Currently I have noticed it can be a bit unstable with mounting drives but I do believe

Conclusion

Over the coming years, I see individuals creating more and more data as consumer electronics become more advanced and this is a great way to store data that can no longer fit on your device. For consumers who already have large photo collections and video collections, it may be too much to upload all the data in one go over standard broadband connections but for those without this overhead, it is easy to see people using this on a day to day basis.

Wednesday
Sep152010

At a Glance: Parallels Desktop 6

Parallels today released their latest and greatest instalment of their virtualisation software, Parallels Desktop 6. Now I have actually been testing the Beta version for the best part of 3 months now in private (as with most testing programmes) so I know the software pretty well now.


The user interface hasn't changed much at all - just minor UI tweaks and they have removed the silly animated virtual machine names that looked good when you first saw it but it soon became annoying. You still have a list of all your virtual machines and the actual virtual machine itself is ver clean and un-cluttered with icons to do everything like directly interface with certain devices.



Now if you read the 'What's New?' page on the Parallels site, you might be forgiven for saying not much has changed. Phrases like "immersive environment" don't really mean much and making things "easier than ever" are good selling points but not enough to warrant the upgrade price just shy of $50 unless you really love your frame rates in games and 5.1 surround sound on your mac. This isn't to say they haven't done enough to warrant it in these fields but for someone who already uses Parallels, they are not what I would consider selling points.

What I think are bigger selling points are the "Manageability and Mobility" and "Enhanced performance" as the Parallels marketing team puts it. In non marketing language, they have a remote control app for virtual machines now for you iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch etc that will let you control your virtual machines over WiFi or even 3G.



I have already done some basic tests on it and I must say I am incredibly impressed with the way you turn it on. As with most cool features that involve handing your computer's screen over to another device, it is disabled by default but a quick trip to Preferences and the Mobile tab will sort you out. Just log into your Parallels account which you created when registering your product and open the app on your iDevice and fill in the same details.



There is nothing amazingly special about the application itself - it behaves like any remote desktop app. Pinch to zoom, tap to click and other finger based gestures to tell the computer. Seems to work very well over WiFi and I was surprised at the performance of it over 3G so now sitting in that meeting going - "does this site work in IE6" or the far more likely want to play Call of Duty on your iPhone in a meeting, is now a possibility.

Back to the software itself. The other feature I would like to draw on if the increased performance. If you have a recent mac that supports the snow leopard 64bit kernel, the upgrade is a must! The performance increase is fantastic. I cannot yet quantify the improvement as this is more of a first thoughts affair but the virtual machine is now a lot quicker to boot, struggles less with multitasking and seeing as it uses less CPU time, will quite possibly be a huge improvement for MacBook Pro owners. They have supposedly upgraded the graphics capability but being the non-gamer I am, I do not own a single game that could put this to the test.

With regards to the other features, they are all very standard. Coherence allows you to merge both the virtual machine's desktop and you macs together so you can enjoy "Your computer might be at risk" warnings from your mac's top bar. You can install pretty much any OS you can get your hands on and its a breeze to do - takes around 15 minutes for me to get from nothing to a full windows 7 installation. I can't really say any more than is already listed at the Parallels website so to save your time, I will not bother repeating any of that as its all pretty much the same as version 5.

So to conclude this short review - Parallels Desktop 6 is well worth the upgrade if you want the ability to manage your VM's on the go, own a 64 Bit Mac or just really love Call of Duty with insane framerates. If neither of these really apply to you and you already own Parallels Desktop 5, I would save your money for now.

If you have not yet bought a virtualisation package, I can highly recommend this for first time users as Parallels guides you through every step and makes it as simply as possible.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Parallels and never have. All views in this review are my own and I am not paid to write any of the reviews - I do it as a bit of fun.

You should follow me on Twitter
Wednesday
Feb032010

SeeSaw Online TV Review

SeeSaw, for those who don't already know what it is, is the attempt at co-ordinated online TV for all the major networks in the UK. You may have already heard of it under the heading of Project Kangaroo, a project that was blocked by the European Competition commission amid fears that it would turn into a monolithic beast of a service, and promptly eat any startups in its way.

SeeSaw Splash Page

That said, Arqiva saved it from certain death and continued to develop it until this point in which they have started inviting people to try their private beta.

Now I am lucky enough to have one of these invites so I shall give you an insight into the service itself.

Firstly once in, you are presented with a very intuitive screen laying out the popular shows, the last few shows you might have missed and a channel selection.

As with most of the web services delivering video, the site uses Flash to stream video straight to your computer offering no chance to purchase or download shows for later viewing.

The range of shows for a very new service is very good but I noticed that despite agreements with ITV, no content was available at the time of this review but this is likely to change. The shows listed tend to have a few series available so you can start watching at series one and follow it all the way through to the latest episodes. The content wasn't just limited to any one genre with everything from reality tv to documentaries and I was very impressed with the catalogue.

Now as a free service, it goes without saying that see ing that none of the TV license's money is used t support this, it is a commercial service which does means there are adverts. Now personally I'm not a huge fan of ads being shown as a pre-roll to every episode or clip of television but the ads themselves aren't a bore and are a huge amount better than pop-ups and side ads like those on youtube that interrupt your viewing experience.

SeeSaw Player

The player appears to be minimalistic and very CPU efficient. It offers standard features like scrobbling through the video, volume, pause etc.

The quality of video is fairly good, with it being standard definition broadcast quality or higher and it you have not got the bandwidth, it shows a message to gracefully downgrade.

I haven't yet found any episodes in HD yet, but that is sure to be in the pipeline when the bandwidth of most home users increases to a stage where it becomes fairly mainstream.

Another good feature, that is featured in Hulu, is the site shade so when you are watching a video, a dark shade covers the site content so as to now distract from the video being watched.

I did find however while using the service, if your internet slows to under 1.5Mbps - you will be unable to watch much even on the lowest setting. Sorry 1Mbps users!

Conclusions

The SeeSaw service looks very promising and I would class it as a serious contender in the IPTV space. The range of shows is comparable to that of Hulu with each member broadcaster giving a broad range of shows in a wide selection of series. A version of the site for mobile devices with the ability to watch on Android or iPhone would be desirable for those on the move. All in all a very good service!

You can sign up for your beta invite at http://www.seesaw.com