They also announced FREE SimpleDB trial for upto 2,000,000 queries per month, every month for next six months.
http://blog.sdbexplorer.com/2008/12/simpledb-2000000-free-requests-for-next-six-months/

What does this mean for Bucket Explorer?

We added “Audit Reports” in Bucket Explorer’s June 2008 release. Not many people have been able to use that since SimpleDB was in private beta. Now since its available to everyone, more Bucket Explorer users can choose the option the create Audit Reports in SimpleDB. This is especially useful for Team Edition, where you may need to track S3 usage by team members with whom you have shared your S3 account.

Another important feature, which our users should expect within next few months is “indexing of S3 meta data in SimpleDB”. This will make Bucket Explorer much more responsive when managing buckets with a large number of objects.

We have added support for all API operations related to CloudFront in Bucket Explorer. To use CloudFront, signup for cloudfront @ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront . You also need to be signed up for S3.

1. Upload your contents to S3, choose a bucket with same name as the CNAME you want to choose for the CloudFront CDN. This will allow you to switch between S3 & CloudFront, by just changing the DNS entry for the CNAME.

2.  Make all files in that bucket publicly readable using Bucket Explorer’s “ACL” button.

3. Use the new release of Bucket Explorer, which supports CloudFront and create a new cloudfront distribution for this new Bucket.

You can read more about these steps on our Introduction to ClodFront page and download the beta from there as well.

All comments on this blog are disabled. Please use our CloudFront forum to provide feedback.

Thanks

Saurabh

More details about changes in this version can be found at the release notes page:
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/amazon-s3–bucketexplorer-2008.11.html

You can download the latest release from our download page:
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/be-download.html

As always, all comments on this blog are disabled. Please use our support forum / contactus link to provide feedback.

We have made several improvements in the June release and have added some new features:

1. Preview of Team Edition. Using this release, now you can use Bucket Explorer and S3 to share buckets. We have a shared bucket feature in earlier versions, but that required multiple Amazon S3 accounts. The team edition works with a single S3 account and you don’t need to expose AWS credentials with every team member. Team Edition (along with commander will be focus of new improvements for new versions in next few months). So, send us your feedback and we will improve it.

2. Improvements in the commander for uploads and downloads.

3. “Trash” Bucket. Now we keep versions of all deleted files in a “trash” bucket. This is specially useful for Team Edition where you want to give all team members delete access but want to prevent data loss.

4. “Versions” - Now we automatically maintain older versions of the files in a “versions” bucket, when you upload a newer (changed) version and opt to overwrite the files.

5. Full Installer for Vista / XP, which respects Microsoft’s recommend folders for keeping config & logs. We no longer write log files & temp file to “Program Files” folder.

The “trash” and “versions” features combined take us one step closer to implementing a “sync” feature. If we can keep older versions during a sync process, both we and our users will be more confident in using sync.

We have made several other improvements in this release related to queue performance etc. We will be adding a detailed release notes page and documentation soon.

Here are the links to downlaod the beta. Remember - this is beta software.

<edit>Links updated - November - 4th </edit>

Windows Full Installer ->

http://downloads.bucketexplorer.com/win/Bucket-Explorer-2008.11.01.01-setup.exe

Windows Zipped / USB Version->

http://downloads.bucketexplorer.com/win/BucketExplorer2008110101.zip

Linux Version ->
http://downloads.bucketexplorer.com/linux/BucketExplorer2008110101.tar.gz

OSX Version ->

http://downloads.bucketexplorer.com/osx/BucketExplorer2008110101.zip

As always, comments on this blog are closed. You can use our forum to provide feedback, and subscribe to the blog if you want to get updates on new releases.

1. Support for “copy”, “rename” & “move”
2. Queueing and enhanced visualization of uploads, downloads, Copy, Move, Rename & deletes
3. Support for updating meta data on existing files.
4. Compare local files & folder with S3 files & virtual folders.
5. Enhanced Proxy Support for NTML proxy.
6. Command line version of Bucket Explorer-Bucket Commander
7. Run multiple instances on same machine
8. Audit reports using SimpleDB
9. Bucket Defaults to set default meta data and default ACLs.

More details on what’s new in this release can be found here ->
http://tinyurl.com/68wy67

This version is a free upgrade for all existing Bucket Explorer Users.

Saurabh

Comments are not enabled on this blog. Please use the forum if you want to provide any feedback

Amazon S3 does not have any concept for folders and files within a Bucket.  When we upload files to a bucket, we don’t need to create a “folder” on S3 to maintain a folder & sub-folder structure. We just use a “/” in file name and when displaying that file, we treat the first part of the file name as folder.

To upload empty folders, which don’t have any files in them, we used a naming convention which was used by a few other S3 client UIs at the time when we released Bucket Explorer 1.0.  We uploaded an empty file with extension _$folder$ to represent an empty folder.

In Bucket Explorer 2.0, we have changed that extension. Now empty folders will be uploaded using “/” at the end instead of “_$folder$”. We have also eliminated the need for these empty files for listing folder structure. You only need these files on S3, if there is an empty folder.

The result is that now you can use Bucket Explorer to explore files uploaded to S3 using virtually any S3 client, including support for Jungle Disk 2.0’s compatibility buckets.

You can find the latest download links in this thread:

http://www.bucketexplorer.com/forum/topic419.html

1. This is beta software, so use with care.

2. Copy between EU & US buckets is not yet supported (by Amazon). When Amazon adds this API on their end, it should automatically work with Bucket Explorer.

3. You don’t need to uninstall the old release. Just download this version and extract it in a new folder, and you can use both versions.

As Amazon has announced the support for copy (just a few minutes ago), we will be adding this feature shortly. Along with copy, we will be adding support for rename, update metadata on an existing file and a “trash” folder for deletes.

Stay tuned.

Note: All comments on this post are disabled. Please use our regular forum or “contact-us” link to post any feedback.

Some of the highlights of this new version are:
(1) Visual queue for uploads, downloads and deletes.
(2) A comparison tool to compare a local folder with S3 folders (identify modified files, before you overwrite existing files in either direction)
(3) Work in multiple windows of Bucket Explorer at the same time.
(4) Version 1.0 of Bucket Commander. A command line tool for uploads and downloads. Sync will be supported in a future release.
(5) Audit reports. These reports are optional and will be stored in Amazon’s Simple DB.
(6) Bucket defaults for uploads. Set default ACL and content type on all files uploaded to a bucket.

Once out of beta, this new release will be priced at $49.99 instead of the current $29.99 price. Existing customers of an earlier release will get free upgrades.

Comments are not enabled on this blog. Please use the forum if you want to provide any feedback

To prepare us for better communication with our users, we have started this blog. Its the easiest way for you to get update notifications during the beta cycle.

If you want to get notified about a new release of Bucket Explorer, changes in Amaozn S3 service API or an important post in our documentation section, go ahead and subscribe to this blog.  All comments on this blog are disabled. Use our support forums to post comments.

There are two ways to subscribe to the updates.

1. If you use rss reader (e.g. Google Reader), then subscribe to the rss feed:
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