'Connected' versions of LOR S4 and S5

[LOR Staff]

Don't worry if your next version of LOR S4/S5 comes with a warning from your security suite about accessing the internet.  S4 has started, and S5 is expanding, downloading files from the internet to update functionality.  If you do get a warning, please ALLOW the program through your firewall.

Before we explain why we are doing this, let us say the following:

NO! YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE ONLINE TO RUN THE SOFTWARE!  EVERYTHING WILL WORK LIKE IT ALWAYS HAS!

If however you are online, the software will now download several files to keep it self UP TO DATE.  We started doing this with S5, and now we are moving some of that functionality down into S4 as well.  We plan to continue to expand this in the future.  For this first baby step in S4, we'll be downloading 2 files for the hardware utility - the LOR Device file (which tells the Hardware utility how to deal with controllers), and another file to support some up-and-coming new Pixie firmware (not yet released).

In order to minimize any security issues, these files are going to be downloaded into your Light-O-Rama data folder.  If you did not change that when you installed that will be My Documents\Light-O-Rama\LORInternal.  Most of the files will be plain text human readable.  In fact, most will be XML based.  While you can see them, you should NOT modify them or delete them.  Really.  Don't touch anything in there.

To support those who work offline, the most current version available at the time of release will also be distributed with the software.  So if you have a computer that is not normally on-line it will still work with the software -- however you may just have outdated files that need to be updated manually.  This is exactly how the software works today - there is no way to update it once it is installed.

So again....  If you get a warning about LOR programs going out onto the internet, please let them.  If you are off-line, don't worry things will still work.

[ItsMeBobO]

Thanks Mike for keeping us updated.    Sounds like a great improvement. 

[LOR Staff]

NOTE:

I merged the messages here that were talking about install failures into the other thread we had going.  If you posted here and your message is gone, look there: