Skipscreen Blog

We’re looking for bids for a simple IE and/or Chrome alpha of Skipscreen, and wanted to give the Skipscreen community a heads up.

If you’re interested in working on this, send a proposal to skipper AT skipscreen DOT com. Proposal can be for IE (8+) Chrome, or both, and it doesn’t have to be based on existing Skipscreen code.

Also, we’re interested in starting super simple: just wait / click / retry support for Rapidshare and Megaupload– no options, no other UI elements. So submit a simple proposal, and a proposal that includes other features too if you like (but not necc). Awesome!

Some anti-virus app is throwing this alert “Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Swizzor” when people download the new Skipscreen installer.

We looked into it and the detection is confirmed to be a false positive. The anti-virus software is detecting code in the inetc plugin for free and open source NSIS installer (which we use). The trojan writer must have used bits of NSIS, a popular installer used by a ton of projects, and then the anti-virus writers messed up and based their detection on this code.

We’ve alerted the anti-virus company to the error and asked them to fix it. Kinda crappy, but seems like it’s the kind of thing that happens every so often.

UPDATE: The anti-virus company has fixed the problem. Also, within a week or two we should be offering a signed installer, which means you won’t get that fear-inspiring “publisher unknown” problem.

I’m looking for a band or for a blog that posts their own (or 100% authorized, no samples, no ambiguity) songs or albums to a website, where it predictably gets > 1,000 downloads in some predictable timeframe. It doesn’t have to be music either, any other kind of totally authorized download will do.

The experiment would entail linking to a file on a skipscreen-supported site via a redirect on our site that shows a diggbar-like message along the lines of “Hey, download Skipscreen and you’ll never have to wait for this site again!”

We’re pretty psyched about this feature, because it’s the perfect moment to learn about Skipscreen: right when you’re most annoyed by a download site. And it’s the best way to share Skipscreen with your friends: wrapped around some file that’s interesting to them.

I just want to test one or two links for a day or two (like, up to 1,000 downloads or so). This could be in exchange for good vibes and a shoutout on our blog. Or if there’s anything you think we could do for you let us know. Interested? Know anyone who might be? Email skipper+skiptest AT skipscreen.com

We made Lifehacker’s best of 2009: Most Popular Firefox Extensions and Themes of 2009!  

Does Skipscreen make your best of 2009 list? If it does, give us a tweet! Being able to download everything you want is totally futuristic. Whatup 2010!!!

AMO just approved a Skipscreen release in only 2 hours. We’re impressed.

Thanks and congratulations to the Mozilla folks for slaying the addon moderation queue!

So yeah, we’re now offering a self-hosted version of Skipscreen on skipscreen.com. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. There were some important features Mozilla wouldn’t let us include (including captcha skipping).
2. Mediafire is detecting Skipscreen and showing our users fake-friendly “tsk tsk” messages instead of just giving them the file they want. As daffy duck said, “thith meanth war”, so we need uber-fast update capability.
3. AMO has made a great effort to get the download queue under control, and lately it’s been very fast. But around the Firefox 3.5 release things got ridiculous and we were waiting months for an update. We can’t afford to be depending on that again, especially if our growing popularity means that download sites are taking notice and breaking us

Advantages to you, the user, will include faster updates (especially for Mediafire) and some too-hot-for-Mozilla features like anti-captcha. So get the self-hosted version today!

Clicking and waiting is just as annoying on search site as it is on those sites themselves. In preparing the latest version, our allstar developer was looking up some documentation on FilesTube and it irritated him.

So he wrote the latest addition to our growing family of skippers, and thanks to our new self-hosted version it’s coming to you in record time!

Over the summer we worked with the author of the infamous Greasemonkey script to make Megaupload anti-CAPTCHA technology a part of Skipscreen. That feature is now in the latest release of Skipscreen, which you can download here.

This feature is awesome in two ways.

1. You never have to enter those annoying four letters ever again
2. Megaupload downloads now require zero intervention. Just open the tab and it works. We even have automatic reloads.

The feature was too-hot-to-handle for Mozilla’s addon directory, so we backed off. But now we’re self-hosting our own version, in part to make it easier to do rapid updates for our arms race with Mediafire. So we figured it was only right to bring back the anti-captcha!

Note: you have to get the self-hosted version (download it from Skipscreen.com not from AMO) to get the anti-CAPTCHA code.

It was a long wait, but the latest SkipScreen release just got approved in the Mozilla Addons queue! It features new stuff like:

• Storage.to support
• 4shared support
• Hotfile support fixed (after website changes)
• Rapidshare improvements (a handler for the “no slots available” error that will retry after the given wait time)
• And more!

We are so psyched to finally get this out the door. The one drawback is that the Mediafire fix in the current beta didn’t make it in there. If you use Mediafire a lot, get the latest version of Skipscreen to avoid annoying and redundant clicks!

To better keep up with future Mediafire changes, we’ll soon be offering our own self-hosted version of Skipscreen that will have more frequent updates and a very special feature that got rejected by AMO over the summer (no joke!).

In the dark depths of the Mediafire menace, we made a Twitter account for Skipscreen. Follow us!