I was out of town for two nights, due to real-life reasons, but I did have some interesting discussions with people during that time. I'v also been doing the usual research / news-reading on many topics - you can't just sit around and develop your stuff w/o keeping close eye on what the rest of the world is doing. The P2P market is ever-changing and evolving, and one has to stay updated of all new developments.

User interface topic (again) is also very interesting, and I'm watching Windows Vista development very closely, since that's what 90% of computers will be running in a year or so - any software developed today must work well with Vista. This is where I love the fact that Hydranode's engine is clearly separated - we can finish the engine, and then slap the latest and greatest GUI stuff on top of it. This is also as modern games are developed, which also have 4-5-year development time - the visual effects are added at the very end, when everything else is finished, otherwise you'd just end up with 4-5-year-old technology.

Another widely-discussed aspect of the GUI topic is whether go with a familiar interface, or an innovative one. The thing is, familiar interface (such as tens of other clients have) is a safe bet - it's tested, users accept it easily, and there are no riscs involved. The few people who come out and say "bah, copycat" can safely be ignored. On the other hand, innovative solution would most probably be very different from what users have gotten used to see/think; this is one of the reasons Microsoft has been very careful in making radical changes to the Windows user interface - familiarity is a very powerful and important thing. You can walk up a 10-year-old windows computer today, and have no trouble at all using it. And the changes that were made in XP, for example the new Control Panel layout - many people still have trouble adjusting to it, 5 years after the fact. So basically, Hydranode GUI should be very familiar to those switching from other clients, to minimize the "surprise" and "re-learning", since people shouldn't need to learn yet another GUI.

I also did background research on Gnutella and Gnutella2 protocols, and from what I see, we'r in for a tough ride there as well - Gnutella is old, widely-extended protocol, much like ed2k, altough what speaks in their favour is the fact that the client's developers are closely working together on newer/updated protocol standards. Gnutella2 can mostly be ignored for now, since the userbase is too small; while the protocol may be better-designed, it doesn't matter if the aren't enough users.

I also talked to cyberz, and we should have ed2k_kad module design documents available soon enough, as well as the prelimiary code merged to svn, since he has no time right now to actively develop it.

Madcat, ZzZz