Fonera 2.0 preview

The blog of our Fonosfera developers community just announced a beta release of the firmware for the Fonera 2.0, the open source router that allows you to manage your relationship with the Web 2.0 (things like uploading pictures to Flickr straight from your camera or downloading files from Bittorrent) and other great stuff like sharing a 3G connection, a printer or a USB drive. If the Fonera is a social router the Fonera 2.0 is a very bright social router that not only allows you to make money and roam the world for free but also to manage your storage, back ups, uploading and downloading activities.

The last beta release introduced a brand new user interface, along with bugfixes and new features. Here are some pictures and notes from the Fonosfera blog:

This is the Dashboard

The new interface is based on the concept of a Dashboard. We wanted to remove any similarities with traditional router management consoles. They’re ugly, not stylish, difficult and not useful at all. This Dashboard is not final, but you can get the concept. There’s a summary area, which is secondary to the 2 main frames: the “Action icons” which have 3 fixed buttons (”Services” for samba, ftp etc, “Plugins” to manage your plugins and “Settings” to change the router configuration) and the icons for each plugin that is installed in the future so they are easy to access. The second frame is the devices/events frame. It will let the user know which supported devices are currently connected and configured in the Fonera 2.0. It is quite 2.0-ish…seamless autoupdates etc.

This is the File Browser

The File Browser is again a beta application. But it now detects different MIME-Types and tells the browser what to do when clicking on them. The look and feel is much nicer and soon will include other interesting information, such as the file size, creation data etc.