Thursday, June 30, 2005

Triton Beta 3

Triton beta 3 was released today at http://beta.aol.com/projects/tritonbeta.
Highlights of the new build:
* Performance has improved substantially (we will continue to focus on this)
* AOL Radio integration (really well done)
* Save screenname and password (finally!)
* Plugins! (will post about this very soon)

As always, please continue to send me your comments, positive or negative (keeping in mind this is still a beta). Outside perspectives are really interesting to us.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read about performance improving, so I thought I would give beta 3 a try since I skipped beta 2.

Application startup of AIM has sped up a very noticeable amount, but initial sign-on resource usage has gone up, why is this?  I watched the processes in task manager and noticed that one AOLServiceHost.exe was using ~50% of my 2.4ghz Intel, and I have 1gig of ram installed.  This cpu usage continued for about 15-20 seconds, and then a new process, "AOLMediaPlaybackControl.exe", appeared in the processes list.  A short while after, I noticed some intermittent low cpu usage of an AOLServiceHost.exe, again.  What does the "mediaplayback" process offer for Triton, that AIM 5.x did not?

I have also noticed that since beta 1, having not tested beta 2, exiting the tray icon does not cut down on memory usage OR kill any processes.  If I exit AIM and the tray icon, there are two processes still running, hogging memory.  Why can't the program be fully exited when the user actually exits in two different places?  This is misleading, and seems to be a sneaky way of "improving performance" by not actually ending the processes, but having it ready when the user wants to use AIM again.  We want to end the program, not just hide it.  When I need my ram freed up, I expect to end the program completely when I click exit, just like AIM 5.x--especially since I'm clicking exit in two separate places relating to AIM.

Juberti, can you throw some information our way?  :)

Anonymous said...

jon8rfc,

I suspect the "AOLMediaPlaybackControl.exe" process is used for AOL Radio since it is integrated into the client now.

I think the processese that continue to run after exiting should be reported as a bug, rather than complained about.  This is a very early beta and should be treated as so!

Anonymous said...

Re: processes remaining when "exiting" - I agree - when you choose Exit, everything should clean up. I believe this to be a reference counting bug - it's not an intentional trick to boost apparent performance.

Anonymous said...

it's getting better :]

Anonymous said...

Hey!  I just came across this site recently.  I have beta tested all 3 betas so far and usually test the old version aim betas also.  I have also seen tremendous improvements in this beta.  Im runnin a PM 1.5GHZ with 512 mB ram so the first beta seemed to go quick anyways.

A few bugs I had that I already reported:
The contact tab seems to want to list my screen name twice and then all the contacts address info, etc twice also.
Notifications don't always display, and sometimes they are blank.
Buddy Icons seem to be blank sometimes so I have to close the IM window and reopen it.

Suggestion I made:
Can we have offline messaging like in Yahoo?  The only reason I sign in Yahoo is to see if someone left me a message (i guess that is what email is for) but still, offline messagin in aim would eliminate my, and i would assume a lot of other people, who sign on to Yahoo to see if someone left them a message when they were offline.

Other than that, I think this is on a great path.  Feature enhancements keep coming, bugs get fixed, and i've seen noticeable improvements.

Anonymous said...

The radio Integration is very slick, but I do not like that I have to settle for the narrowband stream.  I'd like to see a way to switch to the broadband stream so I can put my Klipsch speakers and 3mb cablemodem to use!

Anonymous said...

*Every time I get on my icon and wallpaper are gone! Its very inconvenient.