By now you might have noticed that the Skyrove Portal Page (the very first page you see) and the Welcome Page (the one you see once you’re logged in) have changed quite dramatically! Many thanks goes to rockstar designer Adii!

Comparing the old with the new:

The Old Portal Page

The New Portal Page

We discovered a few problems with the old page. Firstly, we had the contact details at the top. This was in the spirit of making it as easy as possible for people to find our phone number. See Seth Godin’s Knock Knock eBook on Web Design on why this is (usually) a good idea. However, this actually confused many people. They didn’t want to phone us, they simply wanted to get online! Many people thought that they had to SMS or phone us before they could start using Skyrove. So we’ve moved the contact details to the bottom and now make it clear that this is for when you need Help!

Another common problem was that First Timers often didn’t know where to start! Initially we had a small Sign Up link below the username and password fields. This also confused a lot of people. We then moved it up the page, which is essentially the first obvious position for a FIRST time user. But we needed to make it bigger and bolder!

Let’s have a look at the Welcome Page:

The Old Welcome Page

The New Welcome Page

As you can see, the differences are even more glaring here. We’ve noticed that since our last change a lot of people didn’t open the Status Window anymore. There was no real need for it unless you needed detailed information, but that this was a bit of a nuisance factor. What we do now, instead, is to simply show the relevant info as a Status Section on the Welcome Page. If you’d rather have a separate window, you can simply click on Pop Out.

Importantly, if you now close this Pop Out, you will NOT be logged off! (What do you think about this change?)

We are committed to making some changes to the Welcome Page, based on the feedback we get from you! So please leave a comment. The first 20 users to leave a comment will receive a 100 Skyrove credits.

Hope to hear from you!

For several months Skyrove has been running a new firmware version at select hotspots. Here’s a quick overview of what it does:

1. Open Source OpenWRT based

Rather than claiming that our firmware is ‘proprietary’ or be presumptuous enough to call features such as an LED lighting up ‘cutting edge’, as some Skyrove copycats are wont to do, I’d like to point out that our firmware is based on OpenWRT, and in particular the CoovaAP fork and the brilliant work my friend Jeremy Collake has put into it. A special thank you also goes to Murray Long, Skyrove’s lead firmware developer.

2. AnyIP

AnyIP is a CoovaChilli feature that allows devices to connect to public hotspots, despite possibly having the wrong IP address settings. Business travelers often have Static IP and DNS settings. Even worse, these settings sometimes can’t be changed on company laptops!

With AnyIP, the Skyrove router essentially says: “Hey! I can’t give you the IP address I wanted to, so I’m just going to pretend that I did and send you all the internet packets anyway!”

3. Heartbeat Monitor

The new firmware includes our Heartbeat Monitor that has the Skyrove Router send a little message to Skyrove every 60 minutes, simply to say: “Oi! I’m still alive!”. If the server doesn’t hear anything from the Skyrove router for a while, we’ll send out the troops. (Or rather, an email to the technical contact for that hotspot!)

Besides for the email, you can also see how your hotspots are doing at any point in time by logging in to the Skyrove Account Manager. See the picture below for an example.

4. Automatic Updates

The new Skyrove WiFi Hotspot firmware will keep itself up to date, as any good software should! It will periodically check the Skyrove server for any new firmware updates, download it and apply it in the early hours of the morning, provided no one is logged on already!

5. SMTP redirect

One of the most common problems people have at public WiFi hotspots is sending email. You might have seen the ‘Relay Forbidden’ error yourself! The reason for this is that a mail server owned by, say, MWEB, won’t accept outgoing mail traffic from a Skyrove hotspot that might be connecting to the internet using iBurst.

To make things worse, you may not know which server you are supposed to use! This is no longer a problem. With Skyrove’s new firmware, the Hotspot owner can set up the preferred mail server in the router interface. So in future, all mail will be automatically routed through the Hotspot owner’s ISP’s mail server, rather than attempting a 3rd party mail server!

Conclusion

These are just a few of the new features. We don’t think of them as cutting edge, but rather as essential for any Hotspot provider that aims to provide a decent service. Around the corner is a dramatic change in how Skyrove networks will be configured, but more about that next time…

Please email me if you’d like to play with the latest firmware! henk@skyrove.com

By now you would have noticed that Skyrove has a slightly different login process!

In the past, you would automatically see a Status Window, which would display your login status (time, MB left, etc) and also any errors. The problem with this was that it behaved differently on IE6 and Firefox than on IE7 and some people never even saw the status window! It also made it difficult for people using mobile browsers to know what was going on.

With the new Login page, we will first log you in and only if there are no errors, will you see the “Welcome Page” (with links to show the maps, buy more credits etc). Once you are on the Welcome Page, you can now click on “Show Status Window”, which will then open a popup showing your login status.

We realise this might not be the perfect solution for everyone, but we do hope that the consistency between different platforms will be of benefit to you. Please let us know what you think or if you have any ideas on how we can further improve Skyrove!

We’ll give a 100 free credits to the first 20 40 people to leave a constructive comment!

Best,

Henk - Skyrove CEO

UPDATE:We’re running a little poll about what should happen when you close the Status Window. Please vote below!

UPDATE 2:Thanks for the response! Because of your suggestions, we now show your credit balance & remaining MB in the Welcome Page as well.