Monthly Archive 20 August, 2020

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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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Introducing Friend Chat.

Right now, millions of people are collaborating online, hosting and participating in meetings and accessing virtual class rooms. 

Whether you are working as a fully remote team, or just want a simple to use and secure video conference solution, Friend Chat gives you a powerful video conferencing system built for the digital age.

Vegan and raw food inspired brand Olenko’s Kitchen is using our Friend Chat conferencing software for their live video streams.

After trying many alternatives, New York based cinematographer Bill Winters and author Aleksandra Winters found that Friend Chat fit their needs perfectly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlWhjXFYH9Q

VIDEO CONFERENCES WITHOUT LIMITS

Existing video conference solutions have many limitations – a restricted amount of meeting participants, lack of security and even time limits placed on your conferences.

Friend Chat gives you a high quality video conference solution that does more than just show your face to the world.

From a quick chat with a co-worker, to a company-wide presentation, you just send a simple shareable link to your team’s calendars, and with a single click they are in the meeting, no sign ups, so no software installation is needed – it runs entirely in the web browser.

Friend Chat offers more than just simple video calls, turn your meetings into interactive workshops and collaborate with your team, giving you features such as screen sharing, a “classroom” mode, conference video recording, moderator roles and instant chat, whilst reliably handling video calls for small and large groups.

Work in real-time with your colleagues or classmates on documents, presentations and spreadsheets at the same time as a live video, audio or text chat, with annotations, live comments and edit history.

Friend Chat ties into the power of Friend OS, giving you collaborative editing of documents on any device using the neatly connected Friend Office suite.

FRIEND CHAT FEATURES

• Instant messaging
• Conference groups
• Audio and video conferencing, peer-2-peer
• Streaming “classroom” mode
• Conference video recording
• See only speaker mode
• Screen sharing
• Push notifications (on mobile)
• Multiple conference rooms

• Password protection
• Moderator roles
• Secure domains for role enforcement
• Mute participants
• Raise hand to talk
• VoIP integration
• White-label options
• Video conference dashboard for administrators
• Separate mobile apps for iOS and Android

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldolxyO2jRg

FRIEND OFFICE

Friend provides you with a fully MS-office compatible productivity suite that gives you complete freedom to choose where your data is processed and where it is stored. Our Document, Presentation and Spreadsheet apps run on any device while letting you choose where you want to store your documents.

Friend comes with a flexible suite of file systems that lets you store data both on-premise and using your preferred storage provider. Easy user and storage administration make your everyday life easier while keeping your documents safely under your control.

TRY FRIEND CHAT TODAY

Power up an online computer with Friend OS.  You will have access to Friend Chat, and you can work collaboratively in teams and access all of your applications and files directly from your web browser or mobile device.  

To get your FREE demo account, please fill in your details below and we will send your login details. 

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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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