Qnext

I saw a link to Qnext today so I decided to check it out. It's a communications bit of software and lets you do VoIP, video conferencing, chatting, file transfers, remote access, and more. It looks quite nice, although it doesn't have much fancy graphics stuff like some applications (I prefer functionality over funky!).

You can download it here and install it (it uses Java). Once it has installed let it start and it will probably want to update its messages, so let it do that then click the restart button to start it again. Now you will be able to pick a username and password. I didn't bother entering any information in the three optional screens as I just wanted to try the program, but I might go back and fill them in at a later time. Once that is done the program will start properly and log you in. In the top left corner of the screen is your UID number, and a connection icon to the right of it. Hopefully this will be green, but if not then you need to open some ports in your router or firewall (it does support uPnP though, so if you have a proper working uPnP firewall or router then it will automatically open the ports that it needs; yay). You just need to open ports 5235 to 5237 (which is funny, as my router shows 5238 being open!).

After it has started you can get to use the program. You can add other QNext users, or you can connect to various IM networks (Yahoo, AIM, MSN and ICQ) and chat on them. The main things like file sharing and video and audio conferencing seem to only work with QNext users, but I could be wrong (it's logical though that they'd only do it with their own users). You can also browse for things, but I haven't used that yet to see what it does.

That's all the information I can give you so far! I don't have any friends added on there (I don't know anyway else who uses it) so I can't do some of the funky things like the file sharing, photo sharing, music streaming (jukebox style), or video/audio conferencing. If anyone wants to get it and try it out with me then that would be great! My UID is 221971.