Akeeba Remote Control 4 is announced. Cross-platform, easier to use.
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Akeeba Remote Control 4.0.1 (Alpha). This is a complete rewrite of our famous desktop application to remotely backup your Joomla! sites and download the archives locally. This version introduces some long-awaited very important changes.
For starters, this version no longer uses the XML-RPC layer, as it was ultimately dropped in Joomla! 1.6 due to security concerns. Instead, it makes use of the JSON API included with Akeeba Backup 3.2.b1 and later versions. As a result, this version is compatible with both Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 1.6 installations of the backup component!
This new version is based on Appcelerator Titanium, a cross-platform stack which allows creating desktop applications using trusted web technologies, such as HTML, Javascript and PHP. This allowed us to creative native versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X!
Moreover, it no longer uses FTP to download the backup archives back to your PC. This was a major source of grief for you, as many hosts had misbehaving FTP servers which would not list existing files, refuse to connect if you were behind a firewall or even drop the connection in mid-transfer. No more problems! We use a smart procedure which "pushes" the archive files from your server to your PC through our JSON API, one megabyte at a time. It is slightly slower, but much more reliable.
Finally, the interface was simplified and is more intuitive. Everything is laid out in front of you. There is no need to hunt down a feature inside the application menus or context menus. There is also no more complex configuration options to buffle you. We've trimmed down the options down to the absolutely necessary.
As always, Akeeba Remote Control is available free of charge from our Downloads section.
Happy backing up,
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Owner and Lead Developer, AkeebaBackup.com