This time it’s the Control Panel’s turn. We’ve heard all of your requests and that’s why we decided to take a while and polish all the rough edges, to add new features and thus make it easier for you to manage Prey and track your computers for when the time comes.

‘Nuff said. Let’s start from, well, from the beginning, shall we?

1. Forgot/reset my password

Having trouble remembering your password? Fear no more!

2. OK/Unverified devices

This looks like the normal welcome page of the Control Panel, right? Well, look again closely. You’ll notice that the second device reads “Unverified” below its title. That’s because we added states for devices, which will make it easier for you (and us) to know when a device is properly set up or not.

Basically, when you add a new device in your Control Panel, it will default to an “unverified” state, which won’t allow marking the device as missing until the link is actually verified. Whenever the server gets a request from the device (meaning it was correctly configured) it will switch to “ok” and then you’ll be able to activate Prey. This way you won’t have to test the configuration by trying to activate Prey: the Control Panel will simply tell you if it is!

3. Module fine-tuning + new Alarm module

Yup, that’s right. Now you can fine-tune the different modules by changing each of their settings directly in the Control Panel, not having to edit the config files by hand in your computer.

if you look closely your eyes will tell you that there’s another module in there, and you can believe them alright. We just added an Alarm module which allows you to trigger a loud sound on the computer for 30 seconds, which may help you find your computer if it is located nearby. We advice you, though: be careful with this one!

4. Better reports, brighter pictures too

Reports now render all the information — we like to call them traces — collected on the computer. This means you should now see, depending on the active modules, the internal (private) IP address of the missing device, its MAC address, its current uptime, the list of active connections, and so and so on.

This is not noticeable on a first look but it surely is important. Now the Control Panel post-processes dark images so you’ll have a better chance of knowing who’s behind your computer if the picture is taken at night or in a dark room.

5. IE support

We’re not that fond of IE — to be truthful, we have bad dreams about it –, but since we’ve gotten a lot of requests to have better support for IE, we decided to hack our CSS and make it look good better on Microsoft’s browser.

For now the official supported version is IE7 (IE6 people it’s time to upgrade!), but IE8 should render just fine. Any comments please let us know on the mailing list.

There’s also been some minor interface improvements here and there, which will make the site look a bit slicker on others browsers too.

6. New translation system

We also worked out a new system for managing translations in an easier way. This will allow to make translations available faster, thanks to the work of the amazing people who have offered their help. We’re very excited to have this finally out, since there’s a lot of different languages on the way!

By the way, to everyone who have contacted us regarding translations, sorry for taking so long but we’re finally ready!

7. Bigger, bolder server

Yes, Prey has lived only for a couple of months on its current home, but it was already time to make room for more growth. In fact, just today we passed the 200.000 report mark! You shouldn’t have noticed the change (everything was done real smooth), but if you experienced any glitches during the migration process please let us know so we can handle it better next time.

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoy the updates on the Control Panel. As always, suggestions are most welcome, and as always, thanks everyone for the help and the constant feedback. More news to come soon!

Being still in early stages, we had thought that this new service would start off slowly but things have been quite different: we’ve already passed the 1000 user mark! Best of all, it seems to be working really good and it keeps to grow steadily, so we’re very pleased with how things are working out. So big thanks to everyone.

Now, as you may imagine, the control panel does get some load (after all it’s being constantly hit by requests from Prey in devices all over the world), so we decided to take some precautionary measures to reduce the server load, and make sure it keeps up and running as a rock. Most of the stuff you won’t even notice (it’s mainly got to do with caching), but there’s one which you will, and that is that devices will hold a maximum of 10 reports from now on.

Basically nothing happens until you reach your 10-report limit. But if you do, new reports that arrive will “push” the old ones out, deleting the oldest records as well as their associated files.

Being a free service, we simply cannot offer an unlimited amount of record-keeping for devices and certainly not unlimited storage (for your screenshots and webcam snapshots). In fact, with how things are going we’ll probably have to upgrade soon to a bigger server! Anyway, we think that 10 reports is a good number, and probably more than enough to keep track of your computer (heck, probably with just two or three reports you’d be able to catch the guy!).

We’ve also received some requests to raise the maximum number of registered devices on the control panel, but for the same reasons as above we’ll have to say no for the moment. Now, what we are indeed figuring out is whether or not to enable some kind of premium (payed) accounts, that allow registering more devices on the control panel (and perhaps access to more features). We still haven’t made out our minds on this, so we would love to hear your opinions to have a better view of things (through the mailing list please!).

Anyway, you must know that if we do enable premium accounts, we will still (always!) have free accounts for everyone (with a limit, but free as in beer). And of course, needless to say, Prey will be open source software for the rest of eternity. That, you don’t have to worry about.