Well, this has been quite the ride. 

Over the past six months we’ve received a lot of feedback, support, advice, and well wishes from people observing our progress. We’ve been quiet, some say too quiet, with updates; but only because we’ve been busy working and supporting our early alpha users. 

After AeroFS ended up on the front page of HackerNews again two weeks ago (thank you for the submission, Vince!), We decided it was time to step up our efforts in communication outside of our alpha users.

This week we’ve released a new update for AeroFS, EA8.3 (to those curious, the ‘EA’ stands for External Alpha, 8 is the major build number, and 3 is the minor build number).

This release is a milestone for us because as of today we “fully” support three major platforms:

• Microsoft’s Windows XP, Vista, 7 (32 and 64bit)
• Apple’s OSX Leopard AND Snow Leopard (with experimental support for 64bit kernels)
• Ubuntu 8.04+ (32bit and 64bit)
• Unofficial support for other 32bit/64bit linux platforms is also available, but your milage may vary.

We’ve been communicating with Alpha users on a regular basis to try and iron out issues with the user interface, the user experience, and the overall feel of the product. Using your feedback, we’ve revamped the control panel three times (oldest to newest is from first to last): 

Beyond the UI improvements, many of you should notice significant improvements in the syncing algorithm itself, with much better throughput possible on both the LAN and over the Internet. (In fact, many of you have mentioned that you’d actually like to *throttle *the speed with which uploads/downloads happen. This is on our to do list . 

Perhaps one of the most common questions we’ve heard is “Where is my invite?”. From day one of our alpha launch, our policy has been to make sure that any future user has a better experience than the previous user had at the point of their invitation. This means we release invites in small batches and wait for the user feedback to come through from a fresh set of eyes, as well as from existing users. Yes, it is true that many of you who have signed up six months ago still don’t have an invitation, but that number should be rapidly shrinking to zero  in the next few weeks, and if you’ve signed up in the last two weeks: don’t worry, it won’t take us another six months to get to you, promise!

There’s still a lot of work for us to do, but today we’re going to be releasing our largest single batch of invitations to date, so check your emails to see if you got one! 

As this year draws to an end, We would love to wish everyone a very happy holiday season, a merry Christmas to those celebrating, and a happy new year!

See you in 2011! 

Yuri

P.S. To those wondering, These are my favourite (and the best) holiday brewed beers on the market: 

(courtesy of photobucket)