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FRIEND UPDATE: WEEK ENDING OCTOBER 23RD 2020

FRIEND OS HYDROGEN UPDATES: SHAPING THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING

Development pushes forward on Friend OS Hydrogen, it’s a very exciting time for Friend and we’re pleased to share our latest news and updates with you.
Message from the CEO – Hogne Titlestad
The Friend OS is rapidly coalescing into specific verticals where it can do a great deal of good. As the world’s productivity and management software is becoming fully digitalized, new requirements appear for operating systems – and Friend OS can meet the challenges.
Friend OS is a network based Meta Operating System – a technology that can be used implementing a graphical user interface delivered through a browser, with a back-end that behaves like an operating system. This operating system connects resources and end-user software together in a seamless user experience that can be accessed anywhere. Additionally, it can be customized and prepped for any security requirements.
Right now, Friend is being tuned to fully address the needs in sectors such as; medical, governments, remote working and secure video conferencing. To fully represent this, we will modify our website to highlight these focus areas.
In the future, hardware devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets will become irrelevant as software platforms. This is already started to happen. Case in point; Facebook’s Infinity Office and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. When applications become multi-platform and online, the hardware device is simply an access-interface, nothing more.
Friend OS is geared to be the independent operating system and user interface for users who want not only to be independent from hardware platforms, but from software service vendors as well. This gives the user an unprecedented level of choice; pick your own infrastructure, software packages, online services and storage provider and build your ideal workflow.
As Friend OS Hydrogen² nears completion, we can see a feature rich opportunity for those who work online. Support for USB devices and smartcards. High performance networking. Secure 2FA video conferencing and chat. And all the applications you would need to run your business or home office.
With the latest barrage of news from Big Tech players – users who seek an independent and free platform to work online can look to Friend OS. In order to make this point clear to everyone, we will work hard toward making this platform easy to access for all new users.
Developer Update 
At Friend, we have further developed the popular projects FreeRDP and Guacamole to become Friend RDS – our RDP client for Friend servers. This enabled tight integration between Windows and Windows applications with the Friend Workspace. Friend RDS will be available to developers using Friend OS Hydrogen². It enables more features available in FreeRDP accessible through your webbrowser.
Friend RDS is administered using Friend’s new System app. The System app is the only app you need to configure your Friend Server.
Community Update
Soon, our automated online registration for our FriendSky cloud service will be launched. This will make digital onboarding much easier for new and eager users. FriendSky will now also be improved with better support and user follow-up, ensuring a better user experience.
Friend Chat has also seen an update that will be available on FriendSky from next week. This version gives users a consistent user experience between their devices. Additionally, it starts faster, and all chat windows open quicker – improving usability overall.
We hope both new and existing users will reap the benefit of our new features and better contact with our support staff.
Events
Due to Covid-19, we have not scheduled any live events. We are planning a webinar, and will announce this when possible.
Until then, have a great weekend!
Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Discord and Facebook.
Hogne Titlestad – Friend CEO

TRY FRIEND OS HYDROGEN TODAY

If you would like a free demo account on our Friend Sky server, please click here and we will send your login details to you.
You can also download the Friend OS Hydrogen source code and Docker image by clicking here.
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Friend Update – Week Ending August 9th 2020

FRIEND OS HYDROGEN: NEXT STEPS

With the release of Friend OS Hydrogen, our team has been working hard behind the scenes to improve the platform, make it more usable and we have some exciting plans for the next release.    

Message from the CEO – Hogne Titlestad

We feel very excited about where we’re going with Friend OS. With this latest Hydrogen branch, Friend is becoming faster, more secure, has more stability and is really becoming a unique Workspace that can totally transform how we work online. And in these times, it is becoming ever more relevant in the marketplace.

Lately, we have upgraded our entire website, and we feel it is much better at communicating where we are and what we do. In the coming weeks and months we will improve our outreach and service to customers, developers and tech users to make it easier to obtain and use our software.

In the last week, we’ve been very busy working on a new USB technology for integrating various equipment with Friend with as little software installation as possible on the client side. We’ve developed a USB applet that can enable the use of USB peripherals in Windows and Linux applications that’s running in the Workspace using redirection. We will unveil more about this technology as we get closer to completion. This will allow for many new use cases with Friend and make it even more useful in digitalization projects.

Friend is a forward leaning company with a strong vision of the future – based on openness, transparency and software freedom. The more obstacles we can remove that prevent users from using Friend OS, the more companies, organizations and individuals can get free from the dependency on Big Tech solutions and start getting the flexibility of staying independent when they develop and use cloud solutions.

Developer Update 

It’s been a busy week finalizing Friend OS Hydrogen² – the first patch to our LTS version of Friend. We’ve been carrying out heavy load testing and this version is about ten times faster than the previous version. This should make the user experience highly enjoyable for the users. It also means that the Friend Workspace can carry out operations faster – making all apps behave more responsively.

After we have carried out proper testing, we should be ready to release the update next week.

Events

Sadly with the ongoing Covid situation, we are unable to attend any in-person events at the moment, but we will be hosting a Webinar in the next couple of weeks.  This is designed to give you a full introduction to Friend OS Hydrogen, and see some of its best and most powerful features.  If you’ve ever wondered what YOU could use Friend OS for, please take the time to join us for the Webinar.  More information coming soon. 

Until then, have a great weekend! 

Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Discord and Facebook.

TRY FRIEND OS HYDROGEN TODAY

If you would like a free demo account on our Friend Sky server, please click here and we will send your login details to you.

You can also download the Friend OS Hydrogen source code and Docker image by clicking here.

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Friend Update – Week Ending August 9th 2020

Hello Friend community!    It’s been a busy week as the team has been hard at work improving Friend OS Hydrogen. We’ve got several exciting developments and updates that we would like to share with you.
Message from the COO – Hogne Titlestad

The world is still getting to grips with Covid – and disruptions are happening everywhere. It is a very interesting time for sure – the future is being rewritten, and it is hard to fully comprehend where we will end up. But the world is changing. It is becoming more digital – but players are consolidating and new players are popping up.

In these strange times, we are learning to use digital tools more frequently than ever before. Digitalization is allowed into every organization. With huge swaths of the population now working from home, consumer software has been retrofitted with business features. Security is being improved – and we will see a lot more 2FA (two factor authentication) solutions in apps that we are familiar with. Another aspect to this is lawmaking, we will see many new regulations for the Internet and software companies.

In Friend, we see a fast growing market opportunity – and we identify an opportunity for people to seek new tools. This is why we are working to bring our Friend OS to more people, and to make it more feature rich with integrations they need to get things done. Friend is not dependent on any public cloud technology, it is a platform that is independent from Big Tech solutions. Because of this, it will be easy for users to mix and match it with their existing software. Additionally, it will allow them to migrate away from public cloud solutions if they want.

At the end of the day – Friend is all about Freedom and Choice.

 
Friend OS Hydrogen Updates

We are hard at work with our latest upgrade of Friend OS Hydrogen – H2. In this update, we have toiled to improve Friend Core’s sustained performance. Friend Core is a highly multithreaded networking engine, and as such, it is highly complex. System calls inside the Friend Core are counted in the hundreds per second – so bottlenecks are identified and removed.

A big portion of Friend Core is dependent on module calls – mostly using PHP. PHP makes writing features faster and are less exposed to crashing. But some of the code written in PHP makes Friend Core slower than it ought to be. This is why we have rewritten some of our PHP code in C, this should greatly improve performance – and should see the use of PHP modules decrease to where they are absolutely necessary.

We have also been working on making Friend easier to deploy. Therefore, we are now working on producing several Docker images that can be deployed or used as a development environment for developers. In the coming weeks, we will be releasing some videos showing how to use Friend’s Docker images and why it makes sense – so keep an eye on these weekly updates for more information on that.

Please check the Friend OS Hydrogen release page here.
Community Update
We have more requests for demo accounts than ever before. We are approaching 1000 registered users – which will speed up once we get our automatic registration completed. Right now, demo accounts are manually activated and distributed. With more users registered, we will start seeing more community activity and collaboration.
We have started planning some events which will be announced in due time – events targeted at our community as a whole. We understand that users as well as developers need more access to educational material as well as tutorial videos. As soon as this material is made available, we will present it through the weekly updates and through our social media channels.
Events


Sadly with the ongoing Covid situation, we are unable to attend any in-person events at the moment, but we will be hosting a Webinar in the next couple of weeks.  This is designed to give you a full introduction to Friend OS Hydrogen, and see some of its best and most powerful features.  If you’ve ever wondered what YOU could use Friend OS for, please take the time to join us for the Webinar.  More information coming soon.
Until then, have a great weekend!
Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Discord and Facebook.
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Friend Update – Week Ending July 31st 2020

It’s been a busy week here at Friend, with the release of Friend OS Hydrogen!
Message from the COO – Hogne Titlestad

Welcome to the first weekly update in a long while. We’ve been very busy at Friend building Friend OS Hydrogen, our new Long Time Support (LTS) version of Friend that will get updates for the next two years. And because of this, we have been a bit quiet, but this is about to change!
For those of you who have followed us for a while, you will notice that we have a new website. This one is better focused on what Friend Software Corporation can provide. Additionally, we have tried to be more specific about what Friend OS is, and how it is useful to users.
If you’re reading this update – it’s possible that you are already registered at FriendSky.cloud – if not, we urge you to get yourself a free account at https://friendos.com/register. We are gradually upgrading our Friend Sky servers to become a freemium service in production – and we hope you can participate and give us feedback on what works and what can be improved.
Friend OS Hydrogen
Our latest release of Friend brings many improvements, here are some updates you will find in the latest version:
Friend Core updates

• New networking engine – ultra fast and reliable HTTP connections and more reliable socket connections with less packet errors. This has sped up all networking in Friend. Additionally, server-to-server connections now all use SSL.
• Even faster websockets – real-time, persistent Friend server connections. We updated to the latest Libwebsockets version, which in concert with our rewritten network engine has seen great improvements in speed and reliability.
• Support for 2+GB uploads – start migrating large archives to Friend drives.

Friend Chat improvements

• Follow speaker mode now allows for a larger amount of participants in peer-to-peer video conferences.
• Mobile support has been improved.
• Support for iOS have been introduced.
• Many bug fixes!

For further details check out github:FriendChat and github:Presence
Friend Workspace

• We have refactored the file manager and added a gallery mode for large thumbnails.
• We added icon labels for virtual desktops.
• Further improved Workspace notifications with a fixed height, to avoid layout problems on some screens.
• Removed popup-windows on mobile and instead implemented mobile widgets.
• Faster start-up times for launching applications.
• Improved caching of frequently used assets and javascript code blocks.
• Improved mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Collaboration

• Introduced new Shared drive that allows users to share any file with any workgroup or user.
• Now supporting public files (publish on web) for both Home drives as well as Workgroup drives.

Misc improvements

• Improved Admin app for managing Friend user accounts, workgroups and templates.
• My account got support for unicode characters for avatars.
• Security improvements.
• Stability improvements.
• And lots more!

Friend OS Hydrogen got changes to many of its bundled apps, like Notes, Friend Jukebox, My account, Friend Create, Friend Shell.
Please check the release page here.
Developer Update 
Friend is a large project. It consists not only of a powerful server technology, but a complete desktop environment and “userland” applications in several categories. When something changes in one app, it may affect a different part of the system as a whole.
We’ve worked painstakingly since March 2020 to bring you Hydrogen, and we believe it’s a great version and feature-set to commit to over the next two years.
Please see the release page with more information.
Community Update
We wish to do more for the community – and to bring more people together. We have today got several excellent channels where users and developers can interact. Our Discord server is buzzing with activity, but we would really like to see more users interacting on Friend Nexus so we will start communicating on different social arenas – as well as on blogs and zines – to bring more people in.
If you have any suggestions as to how we can become better at interacting with the community, feedback is welcome.
Events
Sadly with the ongoing Covid situation, we are unable to attend any in-person events at the moment, but we will be hosting a Webinar in the next couple of weeks.  This is designed to give you a full introduction to Friend OS Hydrogen, and see some of its best and most powerful features.  If you’ve ever wondered what YOU could use Friend OS for, please take the time to join us for the Webinar.  We will have a link and more information in next week’s update.
Until then, have a great weekend!
Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Discord and Facebook.
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