codelaide software

As we have promised earlier, we’re proud to announce the 1.1 release of Lighthouse. This is a significant feature upgrade that we think you will really like: For this update, we have focused mostly on making Lighthouse even easier and more comfortable to configure and use!

For a start, Lighthouse now supports port ranges in the form of start-end. As an example, if you want to map the ports 5900 to 6000, you no longer have to enter each of them individually into a profile. Instead, you can now use a single line saying “5900-6000″. In the same vein, apart from being able to specify either TCP or UDP for a mapping, you can now also select “Both” to save you some time.

Oh, and another thing you may like: You can now import and export profiles seamlessly. Imagine you have figured out how to configure Lighthouse correctly for a certain application and now want to share the profile you have created with your friends. Easy! Just export the profile, send it to your friends, and they will be able to quickly import it into their own library. Or back up all your profiles to a USB stick and import them on another Mac of yours. Or temporarily export and delete profiles you won’t be using for a while. Whatever you want to do with it, we think importing and exporting of profiles is a very useful feature.

We didn’t stop just there, though: If there’s one thing we realized during the past 2 months, it is that making port mapping profiles is not easy for everyone. It’s true that some sort of understanding of networks is required. Also, it’s often quite difficult to actually figure out which ports are used by an application, especially if this information is hidden deeply somewhere in the documentation. That’s why we want to do the hard work for you. Together with Lighthouse’s new import feature, we’re opening a profile sharing page where you can download profiles for more applications. We will keep adding profiles to the collection so that you will never have to craft a profile yourself again! Just click the new “Get new profiles…” menu item in Lighthouse, download the profiles you need and import them. It’s really that simple (Oh, and I finally used that phrase!).

Good things should also look pretty: Lighthouse now includes a nice start-up animation. It’s not completely useless either! The animation gives you quick hint that Lighthouse has started and is now available in your status bar. However, if you are not too fond of animations, don’t fret, you can simply turn it off in Lighthouse’s preferences.

Of course, a good mix of little fixes has gone into 1.1 as well. For example, some minor UPnP issues (yes, again) have been resolved. Also, Lighthouse will try to associate more aggressively with your router now, which might come in handy in situations where Lighthouse starts up faster than your network does.

Oh, and we updated the built-in help file with more troubleshooting tips for stubborn routers to assist you in getting Lighthouse to work with your particular router model.

In order to allow everyone to give 1.1 a test-drive, we have also reset the trial period on this release, giving all users another full 14-day trial period!

Let’s talk about some bad news now: As of Friday, February 2, 2007, the introductory price of $9.99 will expire. The regular price for Lighthouse will be $12.99. However, if you buy (or have bought) Lighthouse before Feb 2, this price increase does not affect you at all: Upgrades to Lighthouse will ALWAYS be free to ALL registered users. This means that you can save 3 bucks by buying Lighthouse before February 2!

We hope you enjoy using Lighthouse 1.1 as much as we enjoyed making it! And we really love our job…

You can grab Lighthouse 1.1 here.