X-Lite, The Blog

What do you get when you merge one of the world’s most popular free softphones with the world’s most widely used open-source PBX? You get a whole lot of awesome, that’s what you get.

A couple of people from the CounterPath team are currently down in Arizona demoing a beta version of the new X-Pro for Asterisk that will be released shortly. X-Pro for Asterisk is based on the same X-Lite technology that everyone knows and loves, except that it also it comes with the ability to auto-provision against Asterisk PBXs. Included in each distribution will be five free licenses of X-Pro for Asterisk that can be used at no charge. PBX administrators will also have the ability to manage additional licenses directly from our website, making it extremely easy to configure or add new extensions.

For more information about X-Pro for Asterisk, or to sign up to the beta program, please visit the official X-Pro for Asterisk home page. For a limited time, approved members of the beta program will be granted an additional ten licenses for use with Asterisk, so make sure you sign up if you’re interested in participating.

Here’s a video of Mark discussing the new X-Pro down at Astricon in Arizona. Also featured at around the half-way point is Derek (affectionately called D-Rock around the office). Enjoy!

Some of you have already downloaded the release candidate for our X-Lite 4.0 product below. We’ve gotten some great feedback so far, and expect that the number of people downloading it will continue to increase over the next week or so. We’re trying to set an official date for the launch sometime in the next few weeks, but the actual date will depend on open bugs and some timing with various other departments here. But it will hopefully be sometime in late September.

We’re currently working on a couple cool features, one of which is a media/entertainment center. From there, you’ll be able to search for local businesses, watch some online programming, and hopefully find some local ISPs or VOIP providers that will work for X-Lite. These features might not make it into the 4.0 release (although we’re trying), but something should be hopefully out in the near future. It’s still a work in progress, and we’re playing with what pages and information that will be included, but it’s going to provide an easy-to-update area for us that can put a lot of exciting features into. So stay tuned!

Considering there are hundreds of thousands of downloads of X-Lite each and every month, we obviously have a pretty substantial user base. We have a fairly good idea of how people are using it, but I thought I’d ask the question anyways.

So, let me present the first in a series of polls here. If you don’t find that you fit into one of the categories below, or if you are in the “still playing around with it” category, then please drop us a comment with some further details.

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Today we posted a link to the release candidate for a pretty major update to our X-Lite product. X-Lite version 4.0 has a completely new look and feel compared to the previous version of X-Lite, and is based on the same skinning engine that is used in our Bria product.

In terms of the audio and video, the majority of the functionality is the same as the previous product. So essentially it’s the same product most of you have grown to know and love, just with a new look and feel.

One of the main differences with X-Lite’s user interface compared to Bria is that we’ve continued the tradition of making X-Lite dialpad-centric (since we still get a great deal of positive feedback about that configuration). There’s also a full address book, allowing drag and drop calling as well as calling by name.

We’re still tweaking the skin and adjusting a few things, so I wouldn’t be surprised if what we ultimately release is slightly different than what you see here. But since we figure we’re pretty close we thought we’d give people a preview.

We have a pretty exciting road-map in place for X-Lite, so stay tuned for a few more releases over the next little while.

If you want to try it out, feel free to download the release candidate and play around.

We’ve been meaning to start a blog here at CounterPath for approximately three years now. Unfortunately, it’s been quite the rollercoaster ride here for the past few years, and only recently have any of us really had a chance to stop and catch our breath. 

As everyone knows, X-Lite is one of our flagship products, even though we’ve provided it free of charge.  Go anywhere in the world where voice over IP is used (which is pretty much everywhere these days), and chances are you’ll run into our software. I’ve seen it in Internet cafes in Costa Rica, at coffee shops in Vancouver, call centers in Boston, and even in VOIP testing labs in Japan.  That’s something we’re obviously proud of, and something we intend to make sure continues on in the future.

We have lots in store for X-Lite in the short term, so check back here every day or so to see what we’re cooking up. If you have a RSS reader, make sure you subscribe to our feed.

It’s been a while since we’ve made any significant changes to X-Lite, and we’re all looking forward to what X-Lite is going to evolve into over the next little while.