I had the pleasure of trying the latest Xolox Beta for the first time.

I should point out that in the past, I was *never* able to get Xolox to run successfully - it always locked up my machine (then again, I used to have an AMD...)

However, the new version installed flawlessly!

The XoloX installation was very fast and very clean. No added products, and a minimum of screens.

I especially liked the Setup Wizard, including the parental controls. Mature file sharing has indeed arrived.

The Tip of the Day feature was kind of cool but I quickly closed it. I don't think anyone actually reads those but knowing they are there gives a warm fuzzy feeling.

Taking a hint from BearShare (not a bad thing), XoloX includes an embedded browser control in its Search page. This control becomes another "Tab" in the multi-search interface the moment you start the first search.

Unlike BearShare (which shows Ads in its browser instance) Xolox puts some very helpful information on how to search in the HTML.

Unfortunately, the Xolox developers pointed the browser to a public web site (their own). I don't know if this was intentional, but there are pros and cons to this approach:

Pros:
- Easy to update the content
- Can track usage statistics

Cons:
- Might anger the paranoid few
- Can track usage statistics

If Team XoloX doesn't intend to use that space for advertising, and if they can live with only being able to update the HTML on a new release, I recommend that they store all the HTML and embedded images into an .RC resource (yes this is possible).

You can find out how to do this here:
http://www.codeguru.com
and
http://www.codeproject.com

Its a very cool technique, and one that we will be using more and more of in BearShare (although I am split - I would LOVE to remove the bloated IE control from the app completely but its not quite possible yet).

The advetisements are not that obtrusive, and they are an acceptable compromise for getting free software.

What I didn't like about the program:

- The colors. Quite frankly, they suck. Don't impose your maroon fetishes on me, I like a PLAIN windows dekstop. Respect the user's desktop scheme and everyone will enjoy it. YES this means that ugly maroon color in the setup wizard must be changed to the standard window color. And the text color in the list..its got to go!

- No way to view Hosts. I like that they hide the hosts from view, this helps novice users. But I DONT like that I can't show the Hosts if I want to! And there is no control over host connections...

- Doesn't respect show window contents while dragging. EXTREMELY annoying, there is no reason not to have all controls perform live actions. This includes scrolling, moving the splitter, and basically everything where a fugly frame appears instead of the window (or list) contents.

Other things I like:

- Support for SOCKS proxies

- Easy to use for novice users, no complicated settings

- The search is available no matter what view you're on.

- Hot tracking in the lists (underlining the text under the cursor)

- AutoComplete. VERY NICE feature. It would be even better if it was just like Internet Explorer (with a resizable drop down). And it would be *perfect* if it didn't write its settings to the registry (I hate the registry). Fortunately, you can customize the behavior of Auto-Complete with a little bit of COM magic, this is fully explained here:
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems...mplete_wtl.asp

Kudos to the Xolox team, it looks like they really spent some time analyzing what to improve and how to deliver a better user experience. Much much better than the previous version, and they reduced their aggressive re-query intervals.

Good work!