Download the APK or get it at Google Play

A new FrostWire for Android is here, this is a major update that you should not skip, specially if you’ve had issues in the past.

The biggest changes are:

Integration with Archive.org

Archive.org indexes free files from all over the internet, there’s a huge amount of Public Domain files and Creative Commons files, so keep an eye for those archive.org results if you’re looking to remix legally free available content, FrostWire will be a great tool to find it.

Archive.org also indexes torrents of these files, if you download and seed you will help make its contents more decentralized and durable, not to mention you will save archive.org some bandwidth.

The Archive holds over 7.3 million files, it’s a powerful content library that now is easily accesible from anywhere using FrostWire, we hope you find it very useful, for example, law students and attorneys can now use FrostWire to search for public transcript of court cases, among other documents. Almost every known public domain film, book, and audio recording is available and best of all we’ve integrated it with FrostWire after revamping our search architecture which now delivers results as soon as possible to your android device.

Search results coming from archive.org include basic information about the file’s license if available, make sure to check the licenses and to respect your local copyright laws, FrostWire condemns copyright infringement.

Faster Search, Reduction of CPU/Battery consumption

We’ve made search considerably faster, now results are shown as soon as they come in, in the past our algorithm would wait for a certain amount of results to come in and show them to you, the search experience should feel snappier now. Also we optimized and fixed our code and some third party libraries that weren’t meant to be used on Android so now the app consumes up to 84% less CPU which will result in your battery lasting a lot longer if you’re running FrostWire.

We’ve made a few improvements in the bittorrent core, namely the hashing algorithms are about 15% faster than before which also reduces battery consumption while downloading and checking torrent chunks.

More stable and compatible

Since our last release in november we received thousands of crash logs from users worldwide and we went through all of them fixing bug by bug, in the process we did a few updates on the user interface you will notice a nicer looking navigation menu, and more intuitive icons to share/unshare files on the Wi-Fi network.

Many fixes related to the audio player, specially an annoying double-playback bug lots of you reported, thank you.

Full Changelog

For those of you following the codebase and who know geek-speak

FrostWire 1.0.6 - APR/08/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - Reduces CPU and battery consumption up to 84%.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Supports WebM video search results.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Faster hashing and checking of ongoing and finished torrent downloads.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.
 - Fixes bug on Android 4.x where finished document downloads wouldn't appear under
   documents.
 - Avoids crash caused by AdMobSDK and WebView's cache being null.
 - Fixes bug where sharing files from a third party app would open FrostWire
   in a way that hitting the back button would take the user to the desktop and
   not back into the third party app.
 - Replaced navigation menu for a better one that presents itself with a smooth
   brief zoom-in animation.
 - Navigation menu and transfer screen looks properly on Motorola Razor
 - More efficient use of Bitmaps should cut down on the number of Out of Memory errors on most devices.

I’ve been doing what I now consider truly coding for the last 4 years, but I’ve been doing much simpler programming for 10 years.

Something happened more over the last 2 years, as I used other’s peoples libraries and found bugs or thought of ways of improving them, I stopped being afraid or intimidated by other’s people’s open source code and I started reading it, and understanding, and I started critizing, and then fixing, and in most cases now, this is so familiar that I open several projects of other teams and I can now read them as If I had wrote them.

The code, which is meant to tell the computer of an algorithm, all of a sudden becomes a language of intellectual expression on which programmers can talk to each other in these concepts that we somehow try to describe with words, but they’re so much more that language cannot hold. Programmers can try to describe to each other ideas on how to build these systems, but there comes a point where they read each other’s minds and nod, and they start speaking through their code.

Coding has this awesome instant gratification that occurs when you run the code and it works like expected, it’s a really awesome validation of the correctness of your mental model to be able to see the thing working and to experience that along with other people who are thinking about these systems just like you feels great, it’s like speaking another higher level language.

I think the same thing occurs with anybody that is good at whatever they do, they must first get to a certain level of sofistication to be good at it. Comedians eventually master the timing of the joke delivery, and they can perform combos to make you laugh exactly when they want you to laugh. Great comedians disassemble other comedians shows probably even to a mathematical level, just to learn or read what is it that whoever wrote this was trying to do with the public’s

The same with musicians, they speak with more than words when they speak to each other through the music. To be able to communicate with other people like this I think that’s some sort of mind reading

If you’re a geek traveler with a backpack full of gadgets, perhaps you’ve also obsesivelly thought of how to make this tedious part of travelling as fast and issue free as possible.

Here’s my ritual for the damn TSA Security Line.

I usually travel with:
- A jacket since most places I travel to are cold, or the plane cabin could be cold.
- Backpack
- My laptop.
- iPad, Kindle, SLR Camera.
- Belt for my pants, I used to not bring belts so I wouldn’t have to take them off before the line (that’s how obsessive I am about this)

BEFORE YOU GET INTO THE X-RAY CONVEYOR BELT LINE:

If you are wearing a jacket, place EVERYTHING that you have in your pant pockets (that means wallet, cellphone, keys, coins, etc) except your ID/Boarding pass on your jacket pockets, zip em up if you jacket has zippers. If you don’t have a jacket, or your jacket doesn’t have zippers in the pockets, it’s preferable that you put all these things inside one of the outer pockets of your backpack.

WHILE ON THE X-RAY CONVEYOR BELT LINE:

After you’ve given the go by the security officer and you’re about to grab the plastic trays, take your shoes, belt and jacket off and place them on a container.

Immediatly, open your backpack, take your laptop out, put it on a second container, STACK this container on top of the one holding your jacket/belt/shoes.

Then for the iPad,Kindle,SLR camera grab a third plastic container, and again, STACK IT on top of the other two, now you are carryng everything on a smaller area and more people can walk in behind you towards the x-ray machine conveyor belt.

Put your backpack ahead of the containers, and then start unstacking things in the order you prefer, I like having my jacket and shoes first, then my laptop, and then the rest, so I can put my shoes on, restack everything on the other end, and walk to the area where you can sit and re-arrange.

This way you won’t block the line after your things have been scanned and there’s less of a chance you will forget anything.

Oh, and make sure you wear white socks, you don’t want to be profiled as a crazy eastern terrorist by wearing thin black socks.

Obsessive-compulsive Cheers

We’re currently polishing our next release of FrostWire for Android 1.0.6.

Our last release was back in November 2012, since then we’ve received crash reports and lots of complaints that have helped us make the next FrostWire for Android much more robust and compatible for the +2,600 different supported Android devices that run FrostWire on hundreds of thousands of mobile devices every day.

We’ve taken this time to make the search experience considerably faster and we’ve finally been able to integrate our search with another great source of legally free available content, Archive.org.

Archive.org is a non profit organization that crawls and indexes the web’s free content and as of the moment of this writing by having FrostWire connect to its search api you will be able to search through an astonishing number of free and legal works, here’s how they break them down on their home page today:

1,181,452 movies
114,118 live concerts
1,567,041 audio recordings
4,386,872 texts

that’s over 7,246,483 works most of which are tagged with Public Domain and Creative Commons licenses that you’ll be able to download and share with FrostWire.

Most of this content is under the Public Domain and also under Creative Commons licenses.
If FrostWire can detect the license on the content it yields on search results you will see it on screen.

And every year that passes, more works automatically fall into the public domain so you will be able to access more and more information for free absolutely legally, literally from the palm of your hand via FrostWire. We think this goes in line with our mission, and once this update is released the world will be a little better place to be in since all of you will be empowered with free digital works and culture.

Other than that we’ve fixed many crashes, freezes, lowered cpu and memory consumption (which will make your battery last more), we’ve done upgrades on almost all of the application icons, fixed issues for older phones that didn’t have SD cards the way new phones do now, bugs on the audio player and so much more.

Archive.org as a search engine, and a revamp of the search experience is also being added to FrostWire for Desktop so stay tuned for our next desktop release as well (5.5.6)

changelog

FrostWire 1.0.6 - 03/28/2013
 - Faster search results. Search architecture revised and improved.
 - Includes search results from archive.org, which indexes millions
   of public domain and creative commons works from all over the
   internet.
 - FrostWire won't disable screen locking during audio playback.
   It's now up to the user to set longer auto-locking timeouts if
   they want to use FrostWire as an audio player in their vehicles.
 - UI fix, media player screen is correctly updated if a song starts
   while the screen was locked.
 - Updated icons and graphics.
 - Improved mime type detection.
 - Updated UPnP cling libraries for better Wi-Fi sharing discovery.
 - Multiple crashes and freezes fixed.
 - Opens .torrent files from urls and from any file browser.
 - Fixes a crash when sharing files from third party apps like FileKicker
   which pass filepath uris instead of android provider uris.
 - Fixes double audio playback issue with third party media playing apps.
 - Fixes bug where the app would force close and restart on phones without SD cards.

So you got a new Nexus or another Android running Android +4.2 and there’s no “Applications” menu entry in the settings menu.

No worries.

Go to the “About phone” entry at the bottom of settings, then scroll all the way down to the “Build number” menu entry.

Tap on it SEVEN times. (You’ll see funny “toast” messages come along)

When you go back to the main “Settings” menu, you will see a “{ } Developer options” entry.

Cheers

Sometimes you may need to make a TextView (label) look a little transparent to make emphasis on other parts of your UI. The .setAlpha() function on TextView is not supported after later in the SDK. Here’s a static workaround you can place on some sort of UIUtils class you may have in your project.

    /**
     * Android devices with SDK below target=11 do not support textView.setAlpha().
     * This is a work around. 
     * @param v - the text view
     * @param alpha - a value from 0 to 255. (0=transparent, 255=fully visible)
     */
    public static void setTextViewAlpha(TextView v, int alpha) {
        v.setTextColor(v.getTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        v.setHintTextColor(v.getHintTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        v.setLinkTextColor(v.getLinkTextColors().withAlpha(alpha));
        
        Drawable[] compoundDrawables = v.getCompoundDrawables();
        for (int i=0 ; i < compoundDrawables.length; i++) {
            Drawable d = compoundDrawables[i];
            if (d != null) {
                d.setAlpha(alpha);
            }
        }
        
    }

Enjoy, and above all
CODE!

Here’s a utility method I’ve coded for FrostWire’s partial download dialog. With it I’m able to adjust a JTable’s column by iterating over the table’s column model data and calculating the exact dimensions required to render the longest string found. You can specify a maximum width (to avoid some really long strings from screwing up the display) and some right padding in case you need some breathing room.

Enjoy

    /**
     * It will adjust the column width to match the widest element.
     * (You might not want to use this for every column, consider some columns might be really long)
     * it assumes model and jtable != null
     */
    public static void adjustColumnWidth(TableModel model, int columnIndex, int maxWidth, int rightPadding, JTable table) {
    	
    	if (columnIndex > model.getColumnCount()-1) {
    		//invalid column index
    		return;
    	}
    	
    	if (!model.getColumnClass(columnIndex).equals(String.class)) {
    		return;
    	}
    	
    	String longestValue = "";
    	for (int row = 0; row < model.getRowCount(); row++) {
    		String strValue = (String) model.getValueAt(row, columnIndex);
    		if (strValue != null && strValue.length() > longestValue.length()) {
    			longestValue = strValue;
    		}
    	}
    	
    	Graphics g = table.getGraphics();
    	
    	try {
    		int suggestedWidth = (int) g.getFontMetrics(table.getFont()).getStringBounds(longestValue, g).getWidth();
    		table.getColumnModel().getColumn(columnIndex).setPreferredWidth(((suggestedWidth > maxWidth) ? maxWidth : suggestedWidth)+rightPadding);
    	} catch (Exception e) {
    		table.getColumnModel().getColumn(columnIndex).setPreferredWidth(maxWidth);
    		e.printStackTrace();
    	}
    
    }

Note, make sure you invoke this guy only once, usually after the table has been first painted (you could override paint()) or after the model data has been updated (if it gets to be updated and you feel like autoadjusting a particular column)

Copy and paste the following list on a file, say “packages.txt”. To install all just do:

sudo apt-get install $(cat packages.txt)

accountsservice
acpid
adduser
ant
ant-optional
apache2-utils
apparmor
apport
apport-symptoms
apt
apt-transport-https
apt-utils
apt-xapian-index
aptitude
at
base-files
base-passwd
bash
bash-completion
bc
bind9-host
bsdmainutils
bsdutils
busybox-initramfs
busybox-static
byobu
bzip2
ca-certificates
ca-certificates-java
cloud-init
cloud-initramfs-growroot
cloud-initramfs-rescuevol
cloud-utils
command-not-found
command-not-found-data
console-setup
consolekit
coreutils
cpio
cpp
cpp-4.6
crda
cron
cryptsetup-bin
curl
dash
dbus
dbus-x11
dconf-gsettings-backend
dconf-service
debconf
debconf-i18n
debianutils
diffutils
dmidecode
dmsetup
dnsutils
dosfstools
dpkg
dstat
e2fslibs
e2fsprogs
ed
eject
emacs
emacs23
emacs23-bin-common
emacs23-common
emacsen-common
euca2ools
file
findutils
fontconfig
fontconfig-config
fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console
friendly-recovery
ftp
fuse
gamin
gcc-4.6-base
gconf-service
gconf-service-backend
gconf2
gconf2-common
geoip-database
gettext-base
gir1.2-glib-2.0
gir1.2-gudev-1.0
gnupg
gpgv
grep
groff-base
grub-common
grub-gfxpayload-lists
grub-legacy-ec2
grub-pc
grub-pc-bin
grub2-common
gvfs
gvfs-common
gvfs-daemons
gvfs-libs
gzip
hdparm
hicolor-icon-theme
hostname
htop
icedtea-6-jre-cacao
icedtea-6-jre-jamvm
icedtea-7-jre-cacao
icedtea-7-jre-jamvm
icedtea-netx
icedtea-netx-common
ifupdown
info
initramfs-tools
initramfs-tools-bin
initscripts
insserv
install-info
iproute
iptables
iputils-ping
iputils-tracepath
irqbalance
isc-dhcp-client
isc-dhcp-common
iso-codes
iw
java-common
kbd
keyboard-configuration
klibc-utils
krb5-locales
landscape-client
landscape-common
language-selector-common
laptop-detect
less
libaccountsservice0
libacl1
libapr1
libaprutil1
libapt-inst1.4
libapt-pkg4.12
libasn1-8-heimdal
libasound2
libasyncns0
libatasmart4
libatk-wrapper-java
libatk-wrapper-java-jni
libatk1.0-0
libatk1.0-data
libattr1
libavahi-client3
libavahi-common-data
libavahi-common3
libavahi-glib1
libbind9-80
libblkid1
libbonobo2-0
libbonobo2-common
libboost-iostreams1.46.1
libbsd0
libbz2-1.0
libc-bin
libc6
libcairo-gobject2
libcairo2
libcanberra0
libcap-ng0
libck-connector0
libclass-accessor-perl
libclass-isa-perl
libcomerr2
libcroco3
libcryptsetup4
libcups2
libcurl3
libcurl3-gnutls
libcwidget3
libdatrie1
libdb5.1
libdbus-1-3
libdbus-glib-1-2
libdconf0
libdevmapper-event1.02.1
libdevmapper1.02.1
libdns81
libdrm-intel1
libdrm-nouveau1a
libdrm-radeon1
libdrm2
libedit2
libelf1
libept1.4.12
libevent-2.0-5
libexpat1
libffi6
libflac8
libfontconfig1
libfontenc1
libfreetype6
libfribidi0
libfuse2
libgamin0
libgc1c2
libgcc1
libgconf-2-4
libgconf2-4
libgcrypt11
libgd2-noxpm
libgdbm3
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common
libgdu0
libgeoip1
libgif4
libgirepository-1.0-1
libgl1-mesa-dri
libgl1-mesa-glx
libglapi-mesa
libglib2.0-0
libgmp10
libgnome-keyring-common
libgnome-keyring0
libgnome2-0
libgnome2-common
libgnomevfs2-0
libgnomevfs2-common
libgnutls26
libgpg-error0
libgpm2
libgssapi-krb5-2
libgssapi3-heimdal
libgtk-3-0
libgtk-3-bin
libgtk-3-common
libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-bin
libgtk2.0-common
libgudev-1.0-0
libhcrypto4-heimdal
libheimbase1-heimdal
libheimntlm0-heimdal
libhx509-5-heimdal
libice-dev
libice6
libidl-common
libidl0
libidn11
libio-string-perl
libisc83
libisccc80
libisccfg82
libiw30
libjasper1
libjpeg-turbo8
libjpeg8
libjs-jquery
libjson0
libk5crypto3
libkeyutils1
libklibc
libkrb5-26-heimdal
libkrb5-3
libkrb5support0
liblcms2-2
libldap-2.4-2
libllvm3.0
liblocale-gettext-perl
liblockfile-bin
liblockfile1
libltdl7
liblvm2app2.2
liblwres80
liblzma5
libm17n-0
libmagic1
libmount1
libmpc2
libmpfr4
libmysqlclient18
libncurses5
libncursesw5
libnewt0.52
libnfnetlink0
libnih-dbus1
libnih1
libnl-3-200
libnl-genl-3-200
libnspr4
libnss3
libnss3-1d
libogg0
liborbit2
libotf0
libp11-kit0
libpam-ck-connector
libpam-modules
libpam-modules-bin
libpam-runtime
libpam0g
libpango1.0-0
libparse-debianchangelog-perl
libparted0debian1
libpcap0.8
libpci3
libpciaccess0
libpcre3
libpcsclite1
libpipeline1
libpixman-1-0
libplymouth2
libpng12-0
libpolkit-agent-1-0
libpolkit-backend-1-0
libpolkit-gobject-1-0
libpopt0
libpthread-stubs0
libpthread-stubs0-dev
libpulse0
libpython2.7
libreadline5
libreadline6
libroken18-heimdal
librsvg2-2
librtmp0
libsasl2-2
libsasl2-modules
libselinux1
libsgutils2-2
libsigc++-2.0-0c2a
libslang2
libsm-dev
libsm6
libsndfile1
libsqlite3-0
libss2
libssl1.0.0
libstdc++6
libsub-name-perl
libswitch-perl
libtasn1-3
libtdb1
libterm-readkey-perl
libterm-readline-perl-perl
libtext-charwidth-perl
libtext-iconv-perl
libtext-wrapi18n-perl
libthai-data
libthai0
libtiff4
libtimedate-perl
libtinfo5
libtorrent14
libudev0
libusb-0.1-4
libusb-1.0-0
libuuid1
libvorbis0a
libvorbisenc2
libvorbisfile3
libwind0-heimdal
libwrap0
libx11-6
libx11-data
libx11-dev
libx11-doc
libx11-xcb1
libxapian22
libxau-dev
libxau6
libxaw7
libxcb-glx0
libxcb-render0
libxcb-shape0
libxcb-shm0
libxcb1
libxcb1-dev
libxcomposite1
libxcursor1
libxdamage1
libxdmcp-dev
libxdmcp6
libxerces2-java
libxext6
libxfixes3
libxft2
libxi6
libxinerama1
libxml-commons-external-java
libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java
libxml2
libxmlrpc-core-c3
libxmu6
libxmuu1
libxpm4
libxrandr2
libxrender1
libxt-dev
libxt6
libxtst6
libxv1
libxxf86dga1
libxxf86vm1
libyaml-0-2
lighttpd
linux-firmware
linux-image-3.2.0-25-virtual
linux-image-3.2.0-26-virtual
linux-image-3.2.0-27-virtual
linux-image-virtual
linux-virtual
locales
lockfile-progs
login
logrotate
lsb-base
lsb-release
lshw
lsof
ltrace
m17n-contrib
m17n-db
makedev
man-db
manpages
mawk
memcached
memtest86+
mercurial
mercurial-common
mime-support
mlocate
module-init-tools
mount
mountall
mtools
mtr-tiny
multiarch-support
mysql-common
nano
ncurses-base
ncurses-bin
net-tools
netbase
netcat-openbsd
nethogs
ntfs-3g
ntpdate
openjdk-6-jre
openjdk-6-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jre-lib
openjdk-7-jdk
openjdk-7-jre
openjdk-7-jre-headless
openjdk-7-jre-lib
openssh-client
openssh-server
openssl
os-prober
parted
passwd
patch
pciutils
perl
perl-base
perl-modules
php5
php5-cgi
php5-cli
php5-common
php5-mysql
plymouth
plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text
policykit-1
policykit-1-gnome
popularity-contest
powermgmt-base
ppp
pppconfig
pppoeconf
procps
psmisc
python
python-apport
python-apt
python-apt-common
python-boto
python-chardet
python-cheetah
python-configobj
python-crypto
python-dbus
python-dbus-dev
python-debian
python-gdbm
python-gi
python-gnupginterface
python-httplib2
python-keyring
python-launchpadlib
python-lazr.restfulclient
python-lazr.uri
python-m2crypto
python-minimal
python-newt
python-oauth
python-openssl
python-pam
python-paramiko
python-pkg-resources
python-problem-report
python-pycurl
python-serial
python-simplejson
python-software-properties
python-twisted-bin
python-twisted-core
python-twisted-names
python-twisted-web
python-wadllib
python-xapian
python-yaml
python-zope.interface
python2.7
python2.7-minimal
readline-common
resolvconf
rsync
rsyslog
rtorrent
screen
sed
sensible-utils
sgml-base
shared-mime-info
sound-theme-freedesktop
spawn-fcgi
ssh-import-id
strace
sudo
sysv-rc
sysvinit-utils
tar
tasksel
tasksel-data
tcpd
tcpdump
telnet
time
tmux
ttf-dejavu-core
ttf-dejavu-extra
tzdata
tzdata-java
ubuntu-keyring
ubuntu-minimal
ubuntu-standard
ucf
udev
udisks
ufw
unattended-upgrades
update-manager-core
update-notifier-common
upstart
ureadahead
usbutils
util-linux
uuid-runtime
vim
vim-common
vim-runtime
vim-tiny
w3m
wget
whiptail
whoopsie
wireless-regdb
wireless-tools
wpasupplicant
x11-common
x11-utils
x11proto-core-dev
x11proto-input-dev
x11proto-kb-dev
xauth
xfsprogs
xkb-data
xml-core
xorg-sgml-doctools
xtrans-dev
xz-lzma
xz-utils
zlib1g

These was the list of packages I ended up installing on a new web server machine until I stopped needing to put more things in it. I’ll come back and update this list in a few months.

I’ve put this list together because my AWS EC2 image instantiation didn’t work, so I did the old school solution, just install the same packages on a new machine and configure the computer, oh well.

After all these years it’s sad to see that Bing still doesn’t have these simple yet useful features.

It’s worrying what’s happening at Microsoft. I bet they have really smart people, wonder what takes them so long to even react? Philosophy, Very old people in Management? Red Tape? Disconnect between teams? None cares anymore?

Maybe Microsoft needs to hit rock bottom to wake up.

Trying to clone or update a repo, and you get this error?

hg pull -u
abort: error: _ssl.c:504: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

Quick fix, go to .hgrc and put this on your [web] section

[web]
cacerts=

Fixed, remember to leave a tip if you wasted hours on this and I just saved your ass j/k, but no seriously, leave a tip, pleease.