Thanks jum--I've been reading about your work on LW.
Should I completely uninstall my current LW, including the plist, LW folder, and .com.zerog.registry.xml in prefs before using your build to avoid conficts?

à stief: non ça marche tout seul, it's idiotproof!

It should not be necessary if you double click the right app. The only quirk I have encountered occasionally was a corrupted limewire.props file. If you have problems you can move the prefs folder away and try again.

Merci, danke: This has been the best thread yet. Good questions, good information, and now! A solution too.

I would like to second that users do not read manuals. Just yesterday, someone posted saying, something to the effect, "I installed LW, now what?". If your GUI is so unintuitive that a user can't figure out what to do after installation, than something's wrong. Obviously, on the forum, we do get a skewed perception. I mean, people who use the program correctly don't come and tell us how good it is, only the people with problems. Regarding the chunking thing. That bothers me, not knowing if a UL is successful. It bothers me so much, I just turned on the auto clear inactice option, so now I don't see whenever anything may or may not be completed.

Also, a very useful option would be to have two settings profiles. One for UP and one for leaf. Mainly because of this: when I'm UP, a great deal of my UL and DL bandwith is taken, and I can't support as many ULs as when I'm leaf. So if I have my UL slot options set for when I'm a leaf, as UP, I get more ULs than I can handle. And LW seems to ignore or decides based on variables I don't understand how to open up a slot above your minimum slots but below your max, because as UP, I'll open up my max slot setting on leaf, and then a bunch of people get very slow, unreliable DLs. So, if two settings profiles were implemented, i.e., so and so many UL slots on leaf and so and so many slots on UP, it would be very very conveinant.

[edited for grammar]

osu--I think everyone agrees with you: as et voilà said at the beginning, LW should afford to pay someone to ensure that something like the Human Interface Guidelines (isn't this the term Apple uses?) are followed before a version gets out of beta mode. LW and gnutella have a long way to go before they are up to "mission critical" standards. Who should pay for this?

Should LW pay someone to give real answers via Pro Support and develop dynamic documentation? If Pro support is priced on a user-pay schedule, it'd be a lot more than 10 bucks. I've never had an answer by "Zenzele Bell", though Greg and Adam have promptly replied when asked a question. These forums are the place where non-coders vent and even find solutions. This thread is the best example. All of us here have freely helped others based on help freely given from each other. That's the nature of the open-source community as far as I know. It's embarassing to give poor answers and frustrating because we don't know better, but we do what we can. The developers are frustrated at their level too--and they face much more powerful antagonists.

As far as I know, the code is dynamic, and so documentation can't keep up. Hell--the dev don't even have time for a changelog!

What do you suggest to make the "now what?" less of a problem? That is, how could the GUI be more intuitive to say "search, choose a result and click download"?

Other problems, like "what are the numbers before & after the '/' in the Uploads column of a library" are just simply not something that can be concisely explained in a simple GUI. LimeWire is a very complex program, and has all sorts of statistics that can be displayed -- those that are useful for everyday usage I personally think are very intuitive already (but I'm of course biased).

Fancy features like fragmented progress bar (displaying chunks) are nice for people who know that they're downloading/uploading files in fragments -- but the vast majority of people don't know and don't care about that, they just want to know how far along they are in completing their download.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to have a happy medium of an interface between power-users and casual-users... but too often the happy medium in between turns out to be the worst of both worlds.

Regarding seperate profiles for ultrapeers/leaves... with compression turned on, the upstream bandwidth difference between an Ultrapeer and a leaf is around 3-6KB/s, but no more than 6KB/s. It's basically like having one permanent extra upload going. One of LimeWire's goals is to reduce the requirements of all ultrapeers by having more of them (and having optimizations with regards to message exchange). This lets takes more participation, but the burden on any single machine is much much lower.

Sam I think we all congradulate you on the ultrapeer level. This is not what we meant. I'll do some suggestions for you relying on the code of the gui:

1)resume button doesn't work, it should since a download often stop, even if the host is still on Gnet ex; I have to clear download, then click download again in seach results wich is a pain. (for rare files you can't do another search to find more stuff ie French stuff)

2)the "could not download, awaiting sources" sucks a lot, it should say "new specific search is necessary to continue download"

3)the upload tab is occupied in majority with place to see searches coming... not very useful, it could be an option, and it confuses the casual user.

4)when starting, there is a dialog for upgrading to pro, the problem is that for foreign languages as French you don't see the buttons to click ok, you have to press escape, and newbies, especially mac users are utterly lost.

5)there shouldn't be a connection window by default (is it?) Newbies don't use it, and while being at connections, please hardcode the leaf connections to Limewire engine clients only. (gnucleus based suck).

6)please use unicode or à la bearshare change letters ie é to e instead of /e for dealing with other languages, search results are suffering a lot from this, for exemple I have to search okoum instead of okoumé to get results...

7)please update a FAQ and post it sticky on all Lw forums, to help the majority of newbies

8)the look could be better, a way to get ideas is to use other P2P software as Shareaza (beautiful gui for windows), bearshare, emule and even kazaa, keep in mind that EVERYONE is used to the way kazaa works, convergence can be good. Remind to try other programs, they often have good ideas gui wise.

I'm sure others can point you to lacks in the LW gui, and to them post them in this thread!

Merci

Here's a suggestion for a NAT checking utility developed by displaced for Acquisition. LW should have such a utility too, because it checks to see if a user is properly configured to connect to gnutella.
I don't if this bookmark of mine will work here for others:
http://www.sciforums.com/f72/s/showt...threadid=20514

If not, maybe someone who understands Applescript could look at this: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chris.p...ecknat.app.sit

This should not be necessary any longer with LimeWire 3. It has got a patch in that will do this automatically if the force IP option is turned on. One can debate whether this option should be turned on by default.