Fideliphone

The Fideliphone development team is happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of Fideliphone 1.0.

This version contains a number of minor bug fixes that improve the over-all stability of Fideliphone. We’ve also shortened the delays imposed by the adaptive jitter buffer, which should resolve a problem reported by some users where network delays would climb to one second or more.

There have been some problems reported that we have yet to reproduce. If you’re experiencing a problem with Fideliphone 1.0-beta, we’d appreciate knowing whether Fideliphone 1.0-rc1 resolves your problem or not. We’ve also received no feedback about the first draft user manual we began including with Fideliphone 1.0-beta. We’d very much appreciate any suggestions regarding the documentation, so we can make it as clear and easy to understand as possible.

In other news, we’ve created a branch for the next version of Fideliphone. This will allow us to begin working on new features while we continue to address your bug reports. Some of our priorities include support for various nat traversal methods such as UPNP, ICE, and TRN, the ability to record a Fideliphone conversation, and a plugin architecture which will allow third party developers to enhance and extend Fideliphone.

The executable release of Fideliphone 1.0-RC1 can be downloaded at http://www.fideliphone.com/fideliphone-releases/1.0.0-rc1/fideliphone-1.0.0-rc1-setup.exe.

As always, the Fideliphone development team appreciates your feedback and encourages you to spread the word about Fideliphone. Thank you all for your continued support.

Sincerely,
The Fideliphone development team

The Fideliphone development team is proud to announce the public beta release of Fideliphone 1.0.

This release is feature complete.  That means that the release version of Fideliphone 1.0 will contain fixes for any bugs reported during the beta test period, but will not contain any additional features.  The Fideliphone development team will, of course, be happy to continue to take feature requests, which will be prioritized and addressed in future releases.  If there is overwhelming support for changing how an existing feature works, and if that change is feasible without delaying the release of Fideliphone 1.0, we will, of course, consider it, but this will be strictly on a case by case basis.

Fideliphone contains the following additions and changes since the May, 2009 (Preview 7) release.

• A new adaptive jitter buffer has been added which improves handling of less than ideal network conditions.  Fideliphone now dynamicly changes the connection latency to accomodate for longer than normal delays between audio packets.  This could occur on cellular data connections, poor wifi connections, or over long network paths.  In most cases, the adjustments should be fine enough that they are not noticeable.  Audio breakup will still occur, however, if the jitter buffer is not able to completely accomodate your network connection.
• Fideliphone now includes the ability to accept or reject incoming calls.  For those who still wish to have Fideliphone automaticly answer incoming calls like it did in previous versions, an auto answer feature has been added to the settings dialog.
• Fideliphone can now play a ring tone of your choice when an incoming call is received.  In addition, the ring tone can be directed to its own output sound device to prevent it from going out over the air in broadcast situations.
• Fideliphone correctly detects default input and output devices in Windows Vista.  Previously, some users needed to manually select their input and output devices from the settings dialog before Fideliphone would work.  This issue has been resolved.
• Fideliphone can now be installed to a local hard drive, or to a USB or external drive.  If the USB option is selected during the instaallation, the Fideliphone configuration file will be located in the same directory as Fideliphone itself.  This will allow you to move the entire Fideliphone directory from computer to computer without losing your settings.  In addition, Fideliphone will not make any modifications to a computer when it’s run, making it safe for use on any publicly accessible computer.
• Various stability and performance enhancements have been made to Fideliphone, to make it even more reliable than it was before.

We’ve also made some changes to the Fideliphone web site to make it easier for you to provide us with feedback about Fideliphone.

• The sidebar now includes a Help Desk link.  The help desk allows you to login and create trouble tickets which can be handled by the Fideliphone team.  In addition, after logging into the help desk, you can review the status of any existing trouble tickets you’ve submitted.  You can also request that any updates to your trouble tickets be sent to you by email for your convenience.  We ask that you use the help desk system to submit bug reports  to the Fideliphone development team during and after the public beta if at all possible.
• Previously, comments were automaticly disabled 14 days after the most recent post to the Fideliphone weblog.  This has been disabled so that you may make comments to a particular post for as long as you wish.  The Fideliphone development team may still manually disable commenting to older posts after a new post has been added, however commenting will always remain enabled for the most recent post until a newer post has been added.

To download the Fideliphone 1.0 public beta, click here or click the download link on the sidebar.  We’re also releasing a tarball of the Fideliphone 1.0 source code for those of you who want to dig into and modify Fideliphone itself.  This code has only been tested on Windows, but may be portable to OSX or Linux without much trouble.  As we have more time to test Fideliphone on other operating systems, we will of course post more information.

We hope you’ll enjoy the Fideliphone public beta and that you’ll give us lots of feedback so we can quickly address any remaining issues before we officially release Fideliphone 1.0.

Sincerely,
The Fideliphone Development Team