2nd
Progress Update
It’s been almost two weeks since two additional developers joined. I would like to take the time and explain our long and short term plans.
Next Update
We have finished working on the next update. All the features have been implemented and it’s currently being tested. We haven’t identified about any major issues and a public release should happen in the next 7 days if everything goes as planned.
Future
We had a long discussion today about the future of EventBox and the balance between fixing long standing issues versus implementing new features. Since our initial public release we’ve hit some problems with our internal design and we’ve tried to delay any major refactorings as long as possible. This has a significant downside - the more we postpone the changes the harder it gets to fix the architecture in the future. Users can identify internal architectural problems by having to wait longer than expected for seemingly trivial feature requests.
So where does that leave us now? After shipping the next update, our plan is as follows:
- I’m will be working on fixing the performance problems and memory usage of EventBox. Our goal is to reduce peak memory usage to 50-60MB and we’ve got some ideas on how to do that.
- Chris will be working on the iPhone version of EventBox.
- Ralf will be working on a new service for EventBox and he will be spending all his time adding more in the future.
- Douglas will be working on a syncing infrastructure for EventBox which will play an increasingly important role in the future.
Multiple Accounts
We asked our users a week or so ago what they think about support for multiple accounts. Results showed that it was one of the most wanted features in EventBox. In order to provide support for multiple accounts we will have to re-architecture some of the core of EventBox (non-trivial task).
Final Words
What does all of this mean for our users? Let me try and summarize:
- The next update is very close to release
- A lot of major features are coming down the pipeline - syncing, multiple accounts and an iPhone version
- As a consequence of working on major features, future updates might be less frequent for a while
I would like to ask our users to be patient with us while we are busy implementing those tasks - it takes a lot of time and effort and we are dedicated to delivering all of them.
