Curse : Curse Client

Curse Client 4.0 Sneak Peak (updated July 24)

Kaelten — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:57:18 GMT

The development team here at Curse has been hard at work on the Curse Client 4.0.

Crunch Gear was given a sneak peak at the newest alpha client, 4.0. It's been entirely rewritten to optimize performance, speed, and usability. Of course it's going to pack in some new features as well. It's only in Alpha so we can only share this screen shot of the updated UI.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to post a screenshot of our upcoming mac client. Our mac users are important to us, and as a result most of my time has been monopolized by working on the new v4 Mac client. It's a completely native Cocoa app targeting 10.4 and will run on both intel and PPC macs. It's not as far along feature wise as the windows client, but again, I did want to make sure people know that it is actively being worked on.

Mac Update 7/24

I just updated with an extra screenshot from today's alpha release. So please check it out. I hope you guys agree it's starting to come together. :)

Curse Introduces Premium Service - Sign Up Today!

DoranM — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:59:15 GMT

Introducing Curse Premium

We've been developing our Curse Premium service for some time now, and we're proud to announce that it is now ready to be released for your using pleasure. As a Premium Member, you get access to a number of special benefits previously unseen on any MMO Portal. Our goal with the Premium service is to enhance your Curse experience with several elite features that we've built into the network such as:

Premium Curse Client: Update all your addons with a single click!
Faster Addon Downloads: Get in the game faster with lightning fast downloads from Curse.com and through the Curse Client!
Support Addon Authors: A portion of your subscription goes to addon authors via Curse’s Author Rewards Program - helping them develop and maintain the addons you love.
Ad-Free Curse.com Experience: No more ads on Curse.com!
Premium-Only Beta Key Giveaways: Get access to beta key giveaways available only to premium subscribers, and priority access on all Curse beta key giveaways.
Support Curse: Help us keep the new features coming and provide safe, secure addons.
And much more!

Future Plans for the Curse Client

Kaelten — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:49:17 GMT

A few months ago myself and Adamar took over the actual development of the Curse Client. In that time we've taken it a long way, bugs have been squashed, ui's have been polished, and the experience has been streamlined.

However, we are by no means satisfied.

We've listened to the feedback brought to us by our users, we've examined them, and we've studied our options. In the next major release we're going to be doing a lot of things.

Some of these things include:

New features, such as UI Synchronization between computers.
Cleaner, more intuitive, interfaces.
Bugs will be squashed and problem code will be eliminated
No more popup progress bars!
Enhanced support for firewalls and proxies.

For our Mac users we'll also be bringing:

PPC Support
10.4 Support
A true, native feeling custom UI.

We are dedicated to the client as one of our most important products and will be investing as much time, energy, and caffeine as is needed to address the needs of our users.

I'll be keeping you guys updated as we progress including screenshots, screencasts, and further announcements.

Transitioning from WowMatrix to the CurseClient

Kaelten — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:32:43 GMT

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The rough script for the above video, for those who are not able to or don't want to watch it.

Hi guys, my name is Kaelten and I wanted to take a few moments and help some of our new users who are transitioning from using WowMatrix to the using CurseClient.

From the feedback we've been getting I know that a lot of people are seeing something similar to this when they launch the Curse Client for the first time.

I'm about to show you how you can quickly get back on your feet and have your addons updated in no time. I do, however, recommend making a backup of your Addons folder anytime you run any addon manager.

As you can see on the Your Addons tab some of your addons where identified properly. However if you look at the Unidentified Addons tab many more where not.

This is mostly due to the way WowMatrix managed your addons.

The purpose of the Unidentifed Addons tab is to help you find the close matches on our server.

You can go through your files one at a time and click Install like I'm doing here with Bartender4.

This will download and install just Bartender4, which gives you a little more control than using the install all option.

Install All will go through each addon and automattically install the Best Match we have.

As you can see it's downloading each addon it needs and installing them. Now we'll just wait on auctioneer here since it's the largest.

You'll notice that there are no recomendations on a few at the bottom. This means we can't find a close match on our servers, and we won't go downloading updates from other sites.

Now you can go back to the Your Addons tab and will be able to manage your addon updates from here in the future.

I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion people are having. I'll be looking at doing more tutorials in the future as well.

Thanks and Have fun in Wow!

Curse and WoWInterface working together to help protect our authors and other site-users

Kaelten — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:36:42 GMT

Recently Curse and WoWInterface got together to come up with a solution for an ongoing problem. The problem in question is WowMatrix. The reasons they are a problem are many:

WowMatrix violates author copyright and intellectual property rights:
- They redistribute addons without authors' permissions;
- When they first started they would scrape the legimate sites for addons then upload them to their own site in addition to deep-linking from the sites;
- They edited authors' files to remove donation requests and links to their home sites, etc.; and
- They have failed on many occasions to honour authors' requests to remove addons from their application;
In a lot of cases the files served to users have been many versions out of date. This leads to authors having users complain about bugs, bugs that were fixed days or weeks ago in versions that are available on the legitimate sites, causing problems for both the authors and for the end-users;
Until the community raised a hue and cry, WowMatrix didn't even supply the authors' names as to who wrote the addon, let alone provide a link to where the addon was legitimately hosted;
WowMatrix leeches from the legitimate hosting sites without permission, let alone compensation. Originally, they scraped our sites so they could upload addons to their own site without permission, in addition to deeplinking from our sites. They have finally stopped hosting the addons on their own site, but they still deeplink from our sites, using our resources to run their program. Curse and WoWInterface use a lot of bandwidth every month which costs a lot of money. The way we pay our bills is through site ads, which are directly dependent on users viewing them, and premium memberships. WowMatrix bypasses our download pages, and, as a result, people are not viewing the ads. Of course, this means the ads aren't generating any revenue to pay for the bandwidth. At the rate they were going, if they were allowed to continue using our resources without any compensation, they were going to drive us right out of business. Not only are they stealing our bandwidth and preventing us from being able to recoup that loss, they also have their own ads all over their site and application. They are directly profiting from the stolen bandwidth; and
Due to the massive resource drains they put on our sites, we have all experienced heightened loads and weaker performance, especially on patch days. During those days they download so much from our sites that sometimes we have a hard time keeping up to the demands; thus causing legitimate users to experience problems accessing our sites. That's just flat out unacceptable.

For months now, both sites and multiple authors have been trying to come up with solutions to the problems caused by WowMatrix. However, WowMatrix just keeps ignoring authors' requests to remove their addons from their application, working around the protections we have put in place, and proving repeatedly that they have no intention of ever becoming responsible, legitimate members of the community. Instead, they choose to continue to leech off the community. Well we, Curse and WowInterface, have gotten together and between us we believe we may have found a solution to prevent them from pulling authors' addons from our sites to redistribute without permission and stealing our bandwidth any longer. Unfortunately we cannot release details on the solution, so as to keep it viable.

"Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, get to the important question: What does this mean for me, your sites' user?" For the majority of users it should be completely transparent, you should not notice any difference whatsoever, other than improved site responsiveness during patch days. We hope that we will be able to revert the changes made to our sites eventually, if WowMatrix ever stops violating authors' copyright and ceases stealing our bandwidth and other resources.

If you were previously using WowMatrix to keep your addons updated, please use our official updaters (Curse, WoWInterface). You may also mark addons as favorites on both WoWInterface and Curse in order to be alerted when they are updated.

Kaelten
Administrator, Curse & WowAce

Cairenn
Administrator, WoWInterface

Curse Client 2.1 RC1 Release!

Kaelten — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:35:17 GMT

I know it's been a while since I posted my last status update for the project. I apologize for the silence, but we're nearing payday!

So now, after several months of intensive development I want to bring to you guys the first release candidate for the 2.1 line.

What's New‽

Well, almost everything! Well, almost.

What were the issues again?

Here is a brief recap of what I posted in my last announcement as some of the major issues.

   * Ignoring manual deletions
   * Installing over addons
   * Downgrading addons
   * UI feedback failures
   * Poorly worded options and button text
   * Too much automation in some places, too little automation in others
   * Lack of features that are considered defacto standards
   * General reliability

Now let's talk about what we did about them.

What we did about them!

UI Changes

The UI has gone through some major overhauls. Hrm, how can I explain this......

The old client

The new client

There are more changes than can be seen in that screenshot, but I think it gives a rough idea of the depth of the changes.

New Features

Well we didn't get everything I talked about in the last message done. Here's the list. I've struck through things we've finished. Things that are works in progress I'm marking with italics.

   * Alternate Packages - It's back!
   * Dependency Resolution
   * Manual Deletion Detection
   * Alpha Support
   * Multiple Game Support - Even over network drives!
   * Version Pinning
   * Submodule support 
   * Saved Variable Scrubber - It's not 100% tested and polished yet.
   * Automated and Manual Backups 
   * Real Configuration Box - The game manager takes the place of most options.
   * Deletion before upgrade
   * Uninstalled Package Listing - It's the unknown addon listing.

We'll be finishing things up as soon as possible.

Changed Behaviors & Methods

Discovery and Detection of versions If anything we're too conservative now. We've gone through extraordinary pains to make sure that we know exactly which version of the addon you're using. If we don't know, we don't touch it. It can still get a little confused sometimes, mainly if an addon is shared by more than one project. We'll be working out a tweak for that situation shortly. Changes to Defaults Yep they got changed. You may not like some of them, but you shouldn't find them offensive! Popup Questions Well, 99% of the time you'll never see a popup question. Unless you're doing something that you can't undo. Like deleting an addon. We don't want a misclick to make you a sad panda...

The Mac Version

Do you want the good or the bad news first?

I'll start with the bad. It's not here.

The good news is, we're now actively getting it ready for it's first night out. I can't promise exactly when just yet, but Soon has never been so close. I hope to start leaking alphas out next week, but again I can promise nothing!

Conclusion

The one thing I don't think anyone can argue with is that this client is hands down superior to it's predecessor. There is not a doubt in my mind regarding that.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Are there bugs? Sadly, yes I'm sure there are. However, there was no way we could justify continuing to hold back this update and letting people continue to use the old version.

We're looking for feedback as we're getting ready to put this out there to all 700k+ users in the next few weeks. Please use the ticket tracker I'm going to link below to report any feedback. But please, try and see if the ticket already exists.

I also want to apologize to all you guys who've been struggling with the 2.0.0.14 client for so long. Support on it has been weak to non existent, I'm going to be keeping a tabs on things much much closer with the new client in order to ensure that the same backlog doesn't happen with this one.

So guys, last thing I'm going to tell you is how to get the new client. So make sure to check the link section below!