Comment by supercilious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supercilious | Hacker News Reader

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IMHO, the reason Wuala is not popular (certainly the reason I dropped it), is: - Its bloated and slow Java swing client app. - It's buggy as hell, using the dokan integration MD5s of uploaded files do not match often. Using the java client directly works OK, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. - Really poor integration with the OS (it wanted to install a kernel mode driver to create a filesystem mapping.) - The inability due to its cryptree encryption protocols to do any kind of delta-upload. - It had a bizarre notion of permissions, for example, there is no way to hide from the public which groups one is in. - No android client - Poor website, impossible to use on a mobile web-browser

Much prefer the alternatives, like Dropbox, SugarSync mostly these days. Wuala seems like it is ideal for uploading backups and other rarely changing files, and combined with the ability to get 100GB free (almost) storage this is what I think it should be used for. Certainly nothing involving rapid change or collaboration.

EDIT: Bullet point formatting syntax?

Wuala dev here. I just wanted to let you know that we have fixed some of the issues you have mentioned. We'll switch to CBFS as file system driver shortly (that's the same driver SugerSync is using AFAIK). However, this is still a kernel driver. Unfortunately, Windows provides no other way to mount a custom file system. DropBox just syncs an existing folder, but that does not scale to large amounts of data. For example, if you have 100 GB of data online, you cannot sync it to your notebook with a 60GB disk. On the other hand, the dropbox approach is simpler. Delta-uploads (achieved with block-level-deduplication) are planned for spring. You can also disable seeing the public groups in the options now. Also, the UI (which is SWT and not Swing btw) got more light-weight and simpler with the August update. We are not as fast with many things as we'd like to be, but there certainly is progress.

Thats great to hear, I'll try it out again when I get home.

Any word on an Android app or at least an API for third party developers to make one? One of the best things about Dropbox is the API.

Btw: If you still can reproduce the MD5 issue in the current version, could you report it to bugs.wuala.com or send me a message?

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