[Sam]

We've just released the first LimeWire 5 beta. You can check it out at http://www.limewire.com/download/betaversion.php .

If you've tried the earlier alphas, you'll know it's a pretty big change from earlier versions of LimeWire. For those who haven't tried it... The first thing you'll notice is we rewrote the entire interface from scratch. You'll also noticed that we've included support for Jabber (XMPP). This means that LimeWire can sign-on to your favorite Jabber service and it will detect other friends of yours that are also signed on. You can share files directly with your friends. When you search, you'll see results from friends listed above other search results.

Folks seem to be pretty happy with LimeWire 5, and we are too. Keep in mind this is still a beta, so there are still a few lingering bugs and other issues.

For those that use LimeWire's open source code... As part of writing LimeWire 5, we took the opportunity to make the code even easier for aspiring developers to use. There's now an easy-to-use "core-api" component. You can use the "core-glue" component as LimeWire's implementation of core-api, or you can write your own if you'd like to test things out yourself. The tutorials at http://wiki.limewire.org/index.php?title=Using_the_Core will be updated soon to make use of the new API.

Thanks!
The LimeWire Team

[stief]

Hey Sam

for PPC OS 10.4 (Tiger) users, will 4.18.8 be made available on the download out-of-date installers page? I'm assuming LW 5 will not be ported to PPC OS X or for others who must use Java 1.5.

Thanks--sorry that I won't be part of the testing.

[Sam]

Yup, we're gonna redo that page a bit & make it available before 5 is the production version. Sorry not to have you testing LimeWire 5... I wish Apple would release Java 6 for all platforms. :/

[homade79]

how will the updates work? will i have to redownload Limewire when the final Limewire 5 is released or will i be notified to update or will it update itself for me?

i have been trying it for just a few days now and so far it works great exept the pesky notice i get at the opening about saving to an opptional folder (namely another drive) is there a way to kep that from popping up every time i open limewire?

i do like single click downloads but i liked the subwindow that came up when you were downloading a file when i was using 4.18

and is there an opptional way to change the look and color maybe?

[Sam]

LimeWire will let you know when a new version is available, but it won't automatically install the update for you.

What notice are you talking about that you see at the beginning? What exactly does it say?

Also, what subwindow in 4.18 are you talking about? What did that say?

There's no option right now to change the look & color. That may arrive in future versions.

[Jake28]

Does it take long to receive an update notification? I know that 5.05 is out, but I haven't received a notification within LW. Thanks for correcting the bug that I had!

[Sam]

Notifications aren't sent out immediately. We manually trigger them when we feel there's enough changes that a significant number of folks should test it, or if we are confident in the release and know another one isn't coming soon. We're going to try and release a bunch of newer betas this week, and probably won't notify about each one. I'd hate to be caught in a situation where folks get annoyed with seeing too many updates and stop updating.

[Jake28]

Alright cool, glad to hear that you're planning on releasing more beta updates this week! Will inform you if i notice any bugs

The only thing I'm waiting for as of now is the ability to be able to press enter on a song, which doesn't work yet.

[afsfclan]

What happened to being able to view the file size? Seeing that helped me not to download "bad" files....

[Sam]

You should still see the file size listed for all files that don't have a "length" that can be listed instead. If the length is listed, do you still need to see file size (and why)?

(FWIW, you can always see it in the classic view, but we'd like to make sure the list view fits needs too.)