Many of the improvements involve the GUI and the overall ease-of-use of the products. The first aspect I’m going to write about is the new Network Activity window, whose goal is to provide you with real-time information about what’s going on inside and outside of your PC. Those of you who have used our products before will recognize the screenshots below.
Here’s how the Network Activity monitor screen looks like in Outpost Security Suite 2008:
And here’s the 2009 version:
We received many requests to implement this feature, so here it is. The driving principle in the new implementation is the grouping of connections for applications, which we were not able to implement in the 2008 products. This enables you to see traffic summaries as well as separate data for each connection. You can also group connections by column.
Another thing we’re planning to do here is enable application properties and rules list pop-ups when you double-click on an item, so you don’t have to choose Settings and then further options to see the details. A small but useful point which should be implemented in an upcoming iteration.
So what’s the benefit of this approach over the corresponding display in Outpost 2008? In a word, consistency. The more convenient display and simple grouping of items makes the information easier to understand and more intuitive, as you would expect in a mature product like Outpost.
If you would like to try the beta-version yourself and help us improve the product, please go to http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost/betatest.php. We look forward to welcoming you to our beta testing family, and don’t forget to check back here next Monday for another preview. To make it even easier, subscribe to our RSS-feed to receive new information as soon as it’s posted.
Cheers,
Alexey Belkin,
Chief Software Architect, Agnitum
