Well, I think most would agree: it’s been pretty quiet on the OpenMobile forum. :tape:
However, there has been activity in the background. A small group of us have been working to “keep the dream alive”. And alive it is.
:canada:
My name is John. I am an OM team member, although I am not a major OM developer. While I do play around with the code a bit, I am on the team mostly as a tester. Putting test builds through the wringer and discussing with developers what I find, and make a suggestion or two.
Unfortunately the founding member Justchat_1 has not been around. While it resulted in a slow down for a while, this had not stopped development. Keeping in mind that the developers do have regular lives and jobs, I found it amazing the amount of time they DID find to dedicate to this project and resurrect it from the proverbial ashes.
So the good news is - the pace has picked up a bit.
Some of what has been happening (very high level):
- Speed tweaks
- Expanded and improved debugging facility makes plugin development easier
- Numerous improvements to make plug-in development easier
- Numerous improvements to make skinning much easier
- Updated input router
- Added functionality to main menu to facilitate multi-zone
- Fixed bugs in several base plugins
- On-going testing
There are many finer points to that list. Most progress has been in making development easier (framework, plug-ins and skins) to allow things to move forward, and to make intended functionality a reality (such as multi-zone).
There has not been a lot of additional effort on existing plug-ins. The existing base plugins have been worked on. A couple new ones are being finalized. But in all honesty, plug-ins are a bit easier to build, but they rely on a good solid core framework, and that is where efforts have been most concentrated.
As a major tester, I can tell you that things are shaping up. I put OM through trials every day. Multi-zone is a reality but needs a couple more tweaks and fixes. Most of the base plug-ins are, for the most part, solid.
More Good News
As a team, we have decided that, in the near future, we will share an un-official release, for testing only.
IF YOU WANT TO TEST: This post will be updated, and a zip file (for testing) with instructions will be added.
After we make the interim version available, we respectfully request that you limit comments to bugs and glitches. Things that make OM unusable or crash. Requests for added functionality to existing plug-ins, or new plug-ins, cannot be entertained at this point. You are free to build your own plug-ins. We will do our best to let you know if/when a rebuild may be necessary should the framework change. The open source code is still available where it has always been.
There has been NO DATE SPECIFIED as of this writing. However, we promise it won’t be 6 months from now. And it will be worth the wait.
Finally, we will do our best to answer your questions, but be patient. We all live and work in different time zones and may not be able to answer right away. But we will as soon as we can.
John
