We are working hard to get §0.11 ready, it takes a long time to finish but in the meanwhile some updates about the commissions program:
Trails
We hear you. Trails is still slightly buggy and hard to work with at the moment, and hence have not attracted tons of uses yet. We were hoping to stabilize it earlier but unfortunately we are overwhelmed with work on §0.11.
We have decided to allow you some more time to work on your trails so for the upcoming deadline you will not be required to present your final trail but only a draft showing where you want to take it and a description of your trail proposal. You will then be able to further develop your trail and have us here to help you. We prefer your final trails to use the §0.11 architecture as it would be much more stable and would probably make for better works. If you are comfortable with trails as it is, you are welcomed to post your complete trail with your application, but what we’re saying is that you don’t have to.
Spaces
The space commission program has been going well and we are pretty happy with the developer API we have going. Yet it is not yet as developed as we would like it to be (it is in fact the work we’re focusing on for 0.11). The latest release of Greasemonkey has thrown us back a bit too as the way we were debugging spaces has been deprecated as it introduced a security hole. We are working on creating a Javascript based sandbox now, so we are in sync with the latest GM release (for now if you develop using the GM Version 0.7.20070607.0 as long as you test your code on your own sites, you have nothing to worry about).
The main issue is: we are two weeks away from getting a developer release of 0.11 out, and we want you guys to try it before the deadline. Are there §ers out there who could use an extension of the commissions program deadline? Do you guys need another two weeks maybe so you can get more sense for the API and try the developers release?
Sign up to our discussion list and let us know if you guys need some more time!
ShiftSpace 0.11 is going to be a whole new level for the project as we have been basically re-writing the whole platform using object oriented programming and extensively using the Mootools Javascript framework. We are excited to announce the ShiftSpace Documentations are now available for you to go through, download and start hacking on. We have been focusing on getting you something to put your hands on and start developing your own spaces with and we also have a really simple tutorial that would walk you through developing your first space and the key concepts for doing that. To get started right away, you can download our developer nightly build or use Subversion to download the 0.11 branch of our repository which include the manual files and everything you need to setup a ShiftSpace hacking environment on your local machine.
We will continue on porting the rest of the spaces and features over onto the new 0.11 architecture and then launch a new official release, keeping the active release up to date with where the platform is going in general.
Much respect to David and Dan who have been practically committing code to the repository non-stop every two hours for the past three weeks.
enjoy,
The ShiftSpace Team.
Following a long (and fascinating) discussion on the ShiftSpace list, we have come up with a license for the source code of ShiftSpace. This is the short version of it:
ShiftSpace is distributed not only under the GNU GPL license, but also under the GNU LGPL and the MPL licenses. (just like the Mozilla Firefox browser itself)
This means that you are free to use and redistribute ShiftSpace under the conditions imposed by either license, or all, for that matter. You may thus choose to build applications of your own that heavily borrows code from ShiftSpace and license it under GNU GPL, or, if you prefer, use the code under the terms listed in the MPL license.
I am posting the license here for now but will soon hook a link to Trac - an online SVN based project development system we are currently working to install on the server. When we do that, the open sourcerers of you will be able to easily browse our code, and all the rest of us will be able to enjoy a better issue tracking system (better than the current Google Code system)
in the meanwhile,
enjoy the weekend.
A little while ago we’d realized an accidental inclusion in the code repository and turned things to be private until we’d cleaned up our mess. We now have it back up and running at a new URL. Check it out if you’re curious how all the parts work under the hood. Version 0.08 should be coming out soon!
