Public Release Date?

[JDLucas2000]

Sorry for (undoubtedly) reasking a question that you are all sick of here, but is there any date or any kind of Beta release update to let the rest of us poor shulbs know when we, too, can enjoy uTorrent's amazing (I'm sure) WebUI?

Just wondering.

[Determination]

June 31st, 2006.

[JDLucas2000]

Thanks man.

[Determination]

oh, you are very welcome.

[Ultima]

Oh, that's really the release date?

[Firon]

When it's done™

[Determination]

it's a special day; look it up on your calendars if you don't believe me.

[Ultima]

ROFL SHOOT ME xD

(Today's not my day when it comes to common sense...)

[JDLucas2000]

Oh you bastad... I didn't even think it though that much, just that I had "another month and a half atleast" to wait.

Very funny.

[Determination]

thank you thank you. I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.

[Ishidropi]

Hahaha, very funny indeed. KHahaha, very funny indeed.

[pronkax]

@Firon

So, it will be released when it's done...

The logical following up question would be, when is it done ?

[Firon]

When Directrix gets the kinks worked out of it. He's having problems with the columns code.

[Eddie1506]

Other than that, it's working damn fine and looks really nice too.

[StormWalkerZa]

No chance of an open public beta ?? Need to write a php/asp application to handle multiple installations of utorrent on network clusters :-/

[Ultima]

No one said that =o

[StormWalkerZa]

So ..................... Release Date ????????

[dAbReAkA]

June 31st

[Determination]

it brings much joy to my old heart to see the legacy carry on to a new generation.

[Ultima]

@StormWalkerZa: I never said there would be a public beta, but it was never said that there wouldn't be either. It's up in the air as far as we're all concerned -- it's up to Directrix (at least I don't remember him actually talking about a public beta). Whatever the case, asking for release dates is frowned upon.

[StormWalkerZa]

All understandable except for "Whatever the case, asking for release dates is frowned upon"

For what reson would it be frowned apon? I'm sure theres 10's of thousands if not more people who look forward to the new gui, and only ask that we know more or less whats up.

Us poor, humble, webgui starved non-beta testers drool over whats said about the tests and we also want in :-p

Cheers

SW

[Determination]

cause he's doing it free in his own spare time. Below was featured in another thread, but I feel it's applicable:

Complaints about the free ice cream

Gratitude is a virtue...

By: Draginol

Posted: Saturday, August 28, 2004 on Opinionated Techie

Discussion: Business

Never underestimate the ability of human beings to rationalize their behavior. No matter what it is you give away freely, you will always end up with some people who will rationalize that they are customers and should be treated as such.

The blogger who inspired me into starting my blog, Steven Den Beste, has decided to take an extended break from blogging. In a nutshell, he?s fed up. Fed up with people nitpicking his writing. People who make demands on him as if they were his customers with some right to make demands.

He puts it thusly:

I've learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren't also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts.

This isn?t confined just to those who write articles that they freely share on the Internet. Any sort of free product, good, or service will have people who feel they are entitled to make demands on the creator.

So let me give you the 5 rules of free stuff:

(1) Unless money is being paid by you for the product, good or service being provided, you are not a customer. Get over it. You have no rights. Deal with it.

(2) Even if you paid money for the product, good, or service under discussion, your ability to make demands decreases depending on how many separations there are between you and the person you are making demands on. If you paid the person directly, you have maximum leverage. But the more layers there between you and the person you?re talking to, the more diluted your leverage becomes. If I work at Microsoft and I?m posting on some forum, don?t bitch at me that I need to personally solve your Windows problems .

(3) If it?s free be gracious about it. Don?t complain that you should get more free stuff from the person. Anything you ask for is you asking a favor of the person providing the free thing.

(4) Don?t get mad or accuse the person/company of being ?greedy? if some of their products/services aren?t free. Who is really the ?greedy? one? The person who has given away things for free or the person who, having paid nothing, makes demands for more free stuff?

(5) If you think you can do something better then do it. Talk is cheap. Nothing is impossible for the person who has to deliver the goods.

Let me give you some examples of free stuff that we regularly get people demanding customer level treatment:

JoeUser.com

JoeUser is a free blog site I provide with the help of Stardock. The business case for the site is that it doesn?t cost much to provide and enables us to write articles and attract potential customers by its sheer popularity. Eventually it will hopefully pay for itself by having premium blogs. But that amount will still be fairly small.

Even though it is free, every day I get people who email me personally demanding all kinds of things. Not requests -- demands. Requests for help are fine. Demands are another thing. When people start making demands on how the site is run, they need to look up rule #1. If you?re not paying money for the site, you have no rights. You have no right to demand anything. But still, we see people who regularly make public demands or argue how unprofessional I or someone else is. Unprofessional? We?re not being paid to post there. We?re not paid to moderate. We go on there in our free time because we enjoy it. It really gets surreal when I occasionally get people who will create a blog on JoeUser that will call me all kinds of names. Needless to say, those blogs don't last long. Then come the screams of censorship and cries of first amendment protection. There is no first amendment rights on JoeUser. You want rights, then send me a check for $50,000. That's about the amount this site costs to have each year.

WinCustomize.com

This is another free site ? to a point. Originally it was completely free. But the site costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run so we eventually had to put a limit on how much stuff you could download before contributing something back. Still, we get people on there who make all kinds of demands.

Eventually, we had to cap the bandwidth that people could use. After 50 megabytes the user had to either purchase a Stardock product or purchase a subscription (or contribute to the site in some other way such as making skins, icons, tutorials, help in the forum, etc.).

Amazingly, we regularly have people who show moral outrage at the idea that they should have to pay. Somehow we are greedy because they want to use our bandwidth for free forever without giving anything back.

ObjectDock

This is one of the most notorious ones. ObjectDock is the world's most popular "dock" program. Docks are programs that let you put short-cuts and tasks and other things and typically "dock" them to an edge. ObjectDock is freeware. But from day one, there's been a lot of people who have made demands on us to do this or that with it as if they were customers. Not requests -- demands (requests are fine).

And when we came out with ObjectDock Plus, which adds more features than what was in the free version, all hell broke loose. All kinds of people started calling us "greedy" and worse. Lots of demands were made that its features should be in the free version. Or that we have no right to charge in the first place. Why? Because we made the free version available first (as if that makes sense). There are other docks available and they're free too. But they're not updated anymore. Only ObjectDock receives regular updates. But do these people make the connection that maybe the reason the free version keeps getting updates is because of the existence of the Plus version? Not likely.

All of our freeware programs tend to get ignored when people describe our company as a whole. Because we're a (gasp) for profit software company, we get the lunatic fringe anti-capitalistic people who think it's wrong that we sell software at all. Not that they are willing to write software and give it away. But they consider themselves just as much as customers as the people who pay for non-free products.

Like Steven, I get a lot of nit-picking about my blogs and articles and comments. Usually from people who feel they know more than I do on a given subject. Maybe they do but there's no way to know since they're not willing to take the time to demonstrate their knowledge. Most of the time when I write I simply don't have enough free time to qualify every statement to the nth degree. Sometimes I have to oversimplify something to get the point across. I don't have patience for including things that are theoretically possible. I tend to stick with what is practically possible.

Still, some people will pass me links or names of books or articles that I "need to educate myself with" so that I can write a retraction or correction at a later date. When I don't answer those emails, I'll occasionally get a "You've just lost a reader" as if they paid for the site.

The bottom line is that if you didn't pay for the product, good, or service that you're using you need to be conscious of that. Don't delude yourself into thinking you're some sort of customer entitled to anything. Any request you make is asking for a favor. No matter what that request is, no matter how reasonable or justified you believe that request to be, you are asking for a favor.

In other words, don't complain about the free ice cream.

[Ultima]

The general answer you'll get is "when it's done" because there is no set date in the first place. By asking for a release date, you're rushing him by telling him to set a release date.

[bobdapunk]

(requests are fine).

so, can we request an estimate on how much longer the webui will take to be released to the public in some form? no a set-in-stone date, but a general timeframe (weeks, months) or even a percentage currently complete would be cool and would probably quiet a few folk down

oh, and btw, utorrent is simply amazing

[Ultima]

That's still unknown as well -- the most we can say is that it's progressing, as that's all we know at the moment. Things are still actively being changed, so an estimated timeframe probably isn't possible either.