OK so thanks to Scott I now have in my possession the Joost install – downloaded it and went to install. I’ll say this – the install routine could have been a little cleaner. There was a progress bar while installing and then suddenly the whole install window went away and I waited….nothing and then the whole screen is engulfed in the Joost login screen prompting me to login to the site. I goofed and typed the wrong password in the first time before I remembered a capitalization issue and got it right the second time.
Once I put in the correct password I was greeted by some dancing shapes on the big black screen – this was quite a long pause so once the main screen did come up I exited the application and fired up a protocol analyzer to see what’s going across the wire during this long pause. One thing that was interesting to see is that the Joost client caches your password because when I fired up Joost the second time it just went to “Checking your password” and logged me in (to the tune of more dancing shapes)
Watching the protocol analyzer screen during the login/dancing shapes phase of the program launch I saw a spike in TCP traffic which I took a closer look at once I got back to the login screen. Out of 291 packets of TCP data, 61 packets were secured using TLS which was comforting in some ways – whatever data Joost was sending over to the multitude (6 different hosts) of Joost servers was encrypted, but at the same time I have no idea what that data was so it was a mixed feeling ;)
One interesting note – not sure if this was an isolated incident or not (I only just started experimenting with Joost today), but there were a surprising number of malformed packets reported during that exchange. It could be due to network conditions at my location, at the target location or it could be software related as well. I worked with a firmware developer in the past who had malformed SSL packets streaming out of their box that caused me a lot of grief until I was able to show a protocol analysis to them detailing the errors in their packets. I’ll try this again later and from a different location to see if the results are any different.
Here are some neat things I liked so far – basically User Experience (UX) stuff, but I thought worth mentioning…when you first start the program you get a screen that looks like a movie release screen…and when you close the program you get the small grey closing “dot” like on older tube television sets…I especially got a kick out of the closing since I figured there was some developer back at Joost who decided that would be a fun little thing to add and did it.
Unfortunately due to other issues that came up I wasn’t able to play with Joost much further yet…hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to do some more with it.