ACL improvements in CloudBerry Explorer 1.2

As we released version 1.2 I would like to fullfil my promise and share some more information with CloudBerry Explorer users. The information is related to ACL settings in S3. Now you can apply ACL to the list of selected object and all its child objects. For instance, you can setup ACL on a bucket and apply the same ACL to all foders and files inside that bucket. All you have to do is to make sure that "Apply for all subfolders and files" checkbox is checked off. See the screen. Note: that the operation may take long time if a number of child objects is large.

This is very useful and saves a lot of time when you want to apply the same permission to all files in the bucket at ones. We hope you will like a new feature and if you have questions or comments feel free to leave a comment in the blog or contact us directly.

Another cool feature I would like to talk about is an automatic ACL inheritance. You can specify if you want to apply ACL of the bucket settings to all objects that you upload to S3. It is convinient, for instance, if you use a bucket to store pictures that you want to share with other people. You may configure ACL to allow read access to AllUsers group, which basically means that any internet user can view files.

So, once you specify an ACL for a bucket everytime you copy a new picture into that bucket it will inherit permissions form the bucket and the picture will become public. Note: that this option is global and applys to every bucket in your S3 account.

Apply ACL to a child objects

From the very beginning (CloudBerry Explorer 1.0) we have the ability to apply ACL to multiple selected objects. It is usefull when you have a lot of objects in the bucket and want to apply the same permissions (for example grant Read access for AllUsers) to all of them. I thought that it is more then enough, but quite a few customers asked about the ability to propagate permissions to a child objects. It's ok and we will easily implement it in nearest release. But the question is: should we automatically apply "parent" ACL to file uploaded? So user can set up ACL for a bucket or folder and next time he will upoad file into the bucket the bucket's ACL will automatically applied to te file. It would be usefull, but i think it should be an option and user will decide if he want ACL to be applied manually or not.

CloudFront and CloudBerry Explorer

In the mid of November Amazon announced a new service for content delivery called Cloud Front. You have to sign-up before you can use the service. As soon as you are signed-up you can choose the bucket and create a distribution. Note, the AllUsers group must have at least Read access for the bucket. The same applies to all documents you want to deliver thru CloudFront.

We are going to implement the Cloud Front support in the nearest release of CloudBerry Explorer. Approximately it will be released by the end of December. Stay tuned!

BETA 1.1

Three weeks after the first release we release another beta: CloudBerry Explorer 1.1 for Amazon S3.
What's new?

- We have add file upload / download queue. All operations run in background now. You can start uploading files, then minimize the program and continue working with the other stuff. The queue shows you estimated time, elapsed time and transmission speed.

- We have added the MD5 validation support. When you upload files to S3 you can verify if it was uploaded correclty. Note, that it takes an additional time to validate uploaded files. The option is OFF by default.

- Now you can edit standard content-types.

- We have several requests from the users to change the default "Move" to "Copy" when drag file and drop it to the S3 bucket. Now the default action is "Copy".

- We also implement an ability to drag files from Windows Explorer and drop them to CloudBerry Explorer.

We are still looking to make another release this year with a few neat features. We'll talk about them in the next posts.