codelaide software

It’s always good if you don’t have too push out bugfix releases all too often, but once in a while it becomes necessary.

This time, we’re fixing two very rare hangs that could happen when stopping a profile or when heavy traffic is flowing over the router. Additionally, we’ve further reduced Lighthouse’s CPU and memory footprint while increasing its overall snappiness.

On the UPnP front, we no longer require routers to support the retrieval of the external IP address in order for Lighthouse to associate. If the router doesn’t support this, but port forwardings work fine, Lighthouse will happily associate with such routers now and simply report the external IP address as “Unknown”. This should increase Lighthouse’s overall UPnP compatibility and make it work on some previously unsupported models.

Also, we’ve found a weird bug in some recent Netgear firmware that prevented Lighthouse from associating with the affected models. However, we were able to come up with a workaround that solves the problem until Netgear releases a fix. If you have a Netgear router with the latest firmware, but couldn’t get Lighthouse to run, we suggest that you retry with 1.2.1.

Another thing: We realize that some of you might want to get another trial period after the initial one, especially if you are buying a new router etc… It sucks if you want to test Lighthouse again, but find out that you can’t because your trial period has expired.

That’s why we’ve implemented limited registration keys that are only valid for a certain amount of time. In case you want another trial period, just drop us an email at support@codelaide.com and we’ll happily send you a license that’s good for another 2 weeks of free trial.

Lighthouse 1.2.1 can be downloaded here: Lighthouse 1.2.1 product page

By the way: Be sure to check out the Get more profiles page, as we’re periodically adding some new port mapping profiles to it. Just recently, we’ve added a profile for the freeware program Telekinesis that enables you to access your home Mac via your iPhone: Cool!

Lighthouse is on MacZot! today! You’ve still got about 18 hours left to get Lighthouse for a special discount price of $8.99 instead of the usual $12.99.

It’s one of the rare occasions where you just buy the Light and get the House for free!

Lighthouse’s MacZOT! page is here.

Lighthouse 1.2 has landed and brings a nice slew of new features!

For example, you can now temporarily disable Lighthouse if you do not need it at the moment. The icon will turn grey, and Lighthouse won’t access your network in any way until you choose to enable it again. This is a great feature if you happen to frequently connect to networks where you do not (or cannot) use Lighthouse, such as public wireless internet hotspots.

Other nice changes are additional preferences to switch into a newly developed “compatibility” mode in which Lighthouse will fall back to a very simple way of communicating with your UPnP-enabled router. When running in this mode, Lighthouse may exhibit better performance with your router. It’s even possible that the new compatibility mode works with routers that were completely unsupported previously as well!

Also, you can now change the frequency at which Lighthouse will refresh its port mappings, allowing you to find the sweet spot between mapping reliability and minimizing the load on your network and your router.

Of course, we’ve also thrown in some substantial internal improvements and a slew of minor bug-fixes for a bit of extra-flavor!

Last, but not least, we’ve reset the trial period again, giving all unregistered users a new, full 14-day evaluation period. No strings attached!

Lighthouse 1.2 can be downloaded here.

One more thing: We’ll promise we’ll stop with the funky version number word-play headlines for the next release…

While most of us are still waiting for their orders to ship, some lucky individuals have already received their shiny new 802.11n Airport Extreme base stations. Of course, we want to be right there with them and make sure that Lighthouse plays nicely with Apple’s new flagship router.

However, it turned out that a little adjustment is necessary to achieve this, and that’s why we’re releasing Lighthouse 1.1.1 today, introducing full support for Apple’s new flagship router!

Other than that, we optimized some of Lighthouse’s internal workings to make it use even less resources.

You can grab Lighthouse 1.1.1 here.

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.

Codelaide Software sends out virtual “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” cards to everybody!

As a little update on what we’ve been up to, our development is currently focusing on a 1.1 release of Lighthouse. It will be a significant feature upgrade. Expect it to come out in January!

In the meantime… Happy Holidays!

We’re releasing Lighthouse 1.0.4 today, implementing an important fix for everybody who has RapidoWrite installed.

Previous versions of Lighthouse would crash upon launch when RapidoWrite was installed. The reason for this is that there’s a naming conflict between the two applications that causes RapidoWrite to overwrite a part of Lighthouse’s code with its own, making Lighthouse crash. Lighthouse 1.0.4 implements a fix for this issue by resolving the naming conflict, so Lighthouse will no longer crash on Macs that have RapidoWrite installed!

Additionally, we have added the obligatory work-arounds for more UPnP quirks on some routers (did we already mention that UPnP was designed by Microsoft? Clears up some things, doesn’t it?).

However, our UPnP implementation seems to be quite stable now, so if Lighthouse fails to associate with your router at all, chances are very high that your router either doesn’t support UPnP or that you have UPnP disabled in your router’s administration panel (Those things are different for every brand, so please refer to your router’s manual). On the other hand, if you are sure that your router supports UPnP, have all the latest firmware upgrades installed and it still doesn’t work, please contact us and we’ll look into getting it to work!

Download Lighthouse 1.0.4 here!

With Lighthouse 1.0.3, we’re introducing even more fixes for some routers’ flaky UPnP implementation. We’ve had good results with the new version on our test routers, so we hope that it’ll support quite a few routers that haven’t worked previously.

As a next step, we want to concentrate on adding new features to Lighthouse and are working on a 1.1 release. Thanks to everybody who has registered so far!

Lighthouse 1.0.3 can be downloaded here.

We’ve been hearing that some users were experiencing problems with Lighthouse’s UPnP support, not being able to get their UPnP-enabled router to be recognized.

Therefore, quite a good chunk of our last week has been dedicated to scrutinize some debugging code, dig through various UPnP-related technical references and do our best to figure out how to get it working as well as possible (meaning we’re trying to put in un-quirkification code to deal with quirky routers!).

As a result, we proudly present Lighthouse 1.0.2 today. Lots of UPnP-related fixes have been merged into our codebase. It is highly recommended to check it out! Of course, we also put in some more fixes and little enhancements to make 1.0.2 even juicier!

You know what sucks most when trying out some shareware? If your trial period expires just the day when a new version comes out that may fix some problems that have been bugging you earlier! And that’s the reason why Lighthouse 1.0.2 will reset the trial expiration date to give you another 14-day test-drive! Yippie!

You can grab Lighthouse 1.0.2 here. But remember, it’s still highly recommended to make sure the latest firmware upgrade for your router is installed, especially when UPnP is being used!

Have fun, and many many thanks to everyone that helped to get Lighthouse 1.0.2 out!

Lighthouse has been out for roughly five days now, but we’ve already received numerous emails with good and constructive feedback! And eager as we are, we’ve distilled your responses quickly and brewed an update out of them!

Lighthouse 1.0.1 introduces better support for UPnP-based routers as well as fixing some minor issues and typos in the documentation. If you’ve been experiencing some problems with your UPnP router in version 1.0, you should definitely check it out!

For the download link, please see the Lighthouse product page.