The final phase of the StableBit Cloud BETA is here and it’s time for another update.
If you don’t know what the StableBit Cloud is, check out my previous post which describes the service in detail.
Or better yet, to get started with the service, visit: https://stablebit.cloud
What’s New
If you’ve been following the development of this service, the first thing you’ll notice is the newly updated welcome page, which now shows some live data from the service as a whole, along with some of the major features offered. Aside from the welcome page, we’ve also been adding additional functionality to the service, testing everything for scalability, and finalizing the deployment architecture. At this point, we can call the service feature complete for a 1.0 release, so no additional features will be added until post-release.
This final BETA phase is all about testing the limits of the service and making sure that everything is working correctly and reliably before the final is released.
In this blog post I want to briefly talk about some of the new features that were added since the first public BETA debuted in early 2021.
StableBit Installer
In order to simplify the process of installing StableBit apps, linking them to the cloud, and licensing them, we now have a single unified installer that takes care of everything for you with a single click of the Install button.
To get the installer, simply click one of the many download buttons while you’re logged into the StableBit Cloud (e.g. https://stablebit.cloud/Area/Apps) and open the downloaded file directly from your web browser.
When opened from a logged in session, the installer will automatically link the installed apps to your StableBit Cloud account after the installation completes. If you have centralized licensing enabled (https://stablebit.cloud/Area/Licenses), your apps will be automatically activated and ready for use as soon as they’re installed as well.
This makes getting started with StableBit software super simple on new systems, but the installer can also perform upgrades as well.
When run on a system with existing StableBit apps installed, the installer will check for updates for you automatically and offer to update your apps. To update, simply click Install and you’re done.
As before, you can optionally choose to automatically connect the updated apps to the cloud.
To make thing even easier, the installer itself is a single EXE with no dependencies (it’s not based on .NET), so you don’t have to worry about installing .NET or any other components prior to running it. It’s also built to support multiple platforms, but that’s for the future. Today it’ll run on Microsoft Windows, just like the current StableBit apps.
FInally, you can also use the installer to automatically link all of your existing StableBit apps to the cloud, even if they are already updated to the latest versions. Simply running the installer with the Automatically connect apps to the cloud checkbox checked will accomplish that.
Notifications
The next new feature in this BETA is centralized notifications, which are now available for all StableBit apps, once they are linked to the cloud.
Available here: https://stablebit.cloud/Area/Notifications
StableBit apps can now send activity and health notifications via the StableBit Cloud to your iOS and Android mobile devices or to one of the supported notification providers (Web Push, Email, SMS, and Twitter).
The iOS and Android apps are currently in BETA and they will be made generally available together with the StableBit Cloud in 2022. To install the Android BETA today you can get it from the Google Play store. To install the iOS BETA, you will need to install the Apple TestFlight app and then click on the link in the notifications area of the StableBit Cloud to get yourself invited to join the BETA. Visit the above link to get started.
Notification Types
Various notification types are supported by all 3 StableBit apps and each one can be configured individually from the web site or the mobile apps. They all come preconfigured with reasonable defaults, so if you simply want to get notified if anything goes wrong, then you can leave the defaults as they are.
To configure your notification settings on the web, you can visit: https://stablebit.cloud/Area/Notifications?tab=1
Worldwide SMS
In addition to the mobile apps, the StableBit Cloud also supports SMS text message notifications. If you’d prefer to get notified that way, then that’s another option available. Multiple countries are supported for SMS notifications, so you can get notified anywhere in the world.
SMS notifications can be set up from the web: https://stablebit.cloud/Area/Notifications
Release Finals
There were some other smaller improvements to both the UI and (some not so small improvements) to the back-end, but that’s some of the behind the scenes magic that makes everything work, and so we’ll leave it at that.
Coming up next are:
- The 1.0 release final of the StableBit Cloud
- The 2.6 release final of the StableBit Scanner
- The 2.3 release final of StableBit DrivePool
- The 1.2 release final of StableBit CloudDrive
- The release finals of the iOS and Android mobile apps
- The release final of the new unified installer
That’s a lot of releases and that will all happen at the same time in 2022, so stay tuned.