When it rains it pours! In addition to our recent nomination in Cnet’s Webware 100 awards, Jungle Disk has been selected as one of the “Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia” by the Technology Association of Georgia. We were recognized yesterday along with the other companies at the annual Georgia Technology Summit. This is certainly a great honor, since this award also includes many non-Internet technology companies doing great work in the state such as Suniva (HE solar panels) and ScanTech (X-ray security machines). While Georgia isn’t typically know for Internet startups, the area has many quality of life and cost of living advantages over other tech centers and lots of raw talent coming out of the local schools. Maybe we’ll help start a trend. If you’re interested in finding out more about Internet startups in the Atlanta area I highly recommend my friend Sanjay Parekh blog Bilgistic. Oh, and don’t forget to Vote for us in the Webware 100!

We’re pleased to announce that Jungle Disk was selected as a finalist for the Cnet Webware 100 awards. It was nominated in the “Utility & Security” category along with Amazon S3 itself. We love seeing Jungle Disk starting to get attention in the broader technology press and exposure like this as well as the great word-of-mouth support from our users keeps our marketing costs low. If you like Jungle Disk, do us a favor and cast a quick vote for us using the linked image below. Thanks!

Continuing the series of posts on Jungle Disk 2.0 started last week. I’d like to talk about some of the user-interface changes coming in Jungle Disk 2.0 as well as the new related features.

The current Jungle Disk configuration user interface is a serious limiting factor for adding new features to the software. Since most features require new configuration options, the interface needs to continue to expand as the software grows. This is challenging for a few reasons. First is that a complex configuration dialog with hundreds of options is completely overwhelming, especially for new users. In the current user interface, all options as treated equally, and there is no easy way to know which are really important to understand and configure. Furthermore, the space given to describe each option is limited so that the only way to really know what they all do is to read the online manual. Adding to this complexity is the fact that Jungle Disk is really two online storage programs in one - it is a virtual drive that you can use on an ad-hoc basis or with 3rd party backup software, and it is a complete automatic backup and restore system. Most of our users really only use the software one way or another, but the options for both are mixed together in many cases.

In Jungle Disk 2.0 we’re going to take a step back and make some major changes to how the software is set up and configured. To ease first-time setup we’re going to be including a setup wizard that only configures the most important options to start using the software. To help less technical users set up automatic backup we’re planning on adding pre-built backup sets for important files and locations. Most configuration options as well as the automatic backup configuration will now be associated with a specific bucket, and for advanced users we’re going to allow mounting of multiple buckets at the same time (as different volumes / drive letters).  The automatic backup configuration will also be getting a redesign, to allow for much more control and customization, such as the ability to set up multiple backup schedules for different jobs and the ability to enable/disable jobs. Finally we’re going to be taking a new look at how error messages are presented and try to provide more resources to understand the reasons for each message and whether it is cause for concern (without having to post to the support forums). As much as possible we try to eliminate error messages by making the software smarter in dealing with unexpected situations, but with the wide variety of network conditions and computers we see it’s impossible to deal with every situation automatically.

We’re always open to thoughts from our users on the user interface. Feel free to post them as comments here or in our Feature Requests forum. I’ve also started a special thread in the Mac forum to discuss Mac-specific UI changes in Jungle Disk 2.0.

Over the next few weeks I’m planning on posting a series of blog updates about new features and changes coming in the next major release of Jungle Disk (tentatively: Jungle Disk 2.0). This release will bring a host of highly requested features while also laying the groundwork for many others to come.

One of the main changes in Jungle Disk 2.0 has to do with buckets. For those not hip to the lingo, “buckets” are a way of segmenting the storage in your Amazon S3 account to keep some files completely separate from others. In a way you can think of them like separate hard drives. Amazon allows for up to 100 buckets per account, but most users don’t need anywhere near that many. One bucket is all most people need, especially since Jungle Disk lets you share a single bucket for backup across multiple machines.

Amazon S3 buckets are used to store “objects” - primarily files, but also other filesystem objects such as directories. Amazon S3 itself doesn’t have a built-in notion of directories or folders at all. Because of this, it is up to each application that uses S3 to decide how to use buckets to store files and folders - there is no single standard. Jungle Disk was one of the first Amazon S3 applications and created it’s own object naming scheme (that we’ll call Jungle Disk 1.0 Buckets). The naming scheme was unique in that it allowed for enumeration of individual directory listings, something that was not supported originally by Amazon S3 but has since been added. We’ve documented the naming scheme, and released source code that demonstrates object name encoding/decoding on our downloads page. A few developers have added support for this scheme to their applications, however most other S3 applications now use a simpler scheme that uses object names that resemble standard URLs, made possible by a feature called delimiters added to Amazon S3 last year. Some folks have called the Jungle Disk naming scheme “proprietary” because it’s not compatible with most other S3 apps, but it’s important to point out that there is no standard, and each app implements object names slightly differently - particularly when it comes to things like representing empty directories. That said, we realize there is significant demand for Jungle Disk to support URL-style object naming, both to ease compatibility with other applications and to allow it to manage content on S3 for web hosting.

In Jungle Disk 2.0 we’ll be supporting several different types of object naming for buckets - traditional Jungle Disk 1.0 buckets, URL-style “compatibility” buckets, and a new object naming standard we’re calling Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets. Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets will enable us to break free of many of the limits imposed by Amazon S3 and add features that would otherwise be impossible. A few key examples:

• Instant renaming and moving of files and entire directories within the bucket
• Optional encryption of file and directory names
• Ability to change the encryption key for existing files, without re-uploading
• Support for individual files larger than 5GB (may not be available in the first release)

As with Jungle Disk 1.0 buckets, we’ll be releasing documentation and source code for other developers who want to support these features as well. For existing Jungle Disk users who want to take advantage of these new features we’ll be supporting conversion from Jungle Disk 1.0 buckets (without needing to re-upload all your files). The table below summarizes the features offered by each bucket type:

Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets will also allow us to offer the option of using the European S3 endpoint for European customers while maintaining the ability to easily rename and move files. Jungle Disk Plus features won’t be available in Europe until a European based version of EC2 is available.