I am super proud to announce that Elizabeth Naramore has agreed to become Support Lead for Spaz. Liz is an accomplished PHP developer and a tireless community organizer for open source. I am honored that she’s chosen to help Spaz.
If you are interested in helping with user support for Spaz, please check out the Spaz User Support Team Google group, and tell Elizabeth you want to help.
I’m really happy to announce that Ron Devera has agreed to become the UI Lead for Spaz Desktop.
Spaz has been a very informally organized project since I began it back in spring 2007. A number of people have contributed important pieces of code, and support was primarily handled by @kibitzer for over a year.
So why a title and all that? It seems like a good idea at the moment. I’ve been trying to establish more structure in the development and support efforts of Spaz to make it easier for others to contribute, including Lighthouse (development coordination) and Tender (user support) sites where volunteers can see who needs help and what needs to be done. Adding an “official” team member is a part of these efforts.
Ron is a smart, talented developer, with a diverse set of skills, and he’s demonstrated an ongoing commitment to making his contributed “Leopaz” theme very high-quality. He’s a strong JavaScript, Ruby and HTML/CSS dev, and his attention to detail has made Leopaz the strongest theme Spaz offers. I’m very excited about having him a part of the team.
I really don’t like to toot my own horn. Well, actually I do, but I’m also embarassed by it, so writing the title for this post was a bit painful. Nevertheless, I do think it’s accurate: Spaz webOS 1.0 is now available in the Palm App Catalog, and that’s a significant milestone for the project, and for open source on webOS.
I first started playing with webOS a year ago, over Christmas break at my day job. In June, Spaz webOS was in the App Catalog at release, and back then I was quite proud of the fact that we’d been able to ship a truly open source, transparent app on the first day of a new platform. And now, a year since I first cobbled together a Hello World in Mojo, Spaz has reached a reasonable level of maturity – at least as mature as something called “Spaz” will ever have.
Originally I was going to call this release v0.6. I am shy of using 1.0 because I am painfully aware of all the flaws in my software, and it certainly never feels “done” or “ready” to me. However, a recent discussion with Keith Casey led me to think more seriously about using the “1.0” designation – Spaz webOS is very much Safe To Use, but a pre-1.0 version might make some potential users to think otherwise.
And potential users are a bit more of a consideration now, because in a couple weeks (probably the week of January 11), Spaz webOS will start charging $2 for App Catalog downloads in the United States. This is something I’ve been planning for a while, but it’s still stepping out a bit, both for me (I’ve never charged for software before) and for open source software in general. To be clear, here’s how it will work:
Another thing that isn’t changing is the principles that guide the Spaz project. I wrote up a statement of purpose a while, back, which I’ll replicate here:
- Spaz was built for the sake of building it. It is not a means to an end. However, creating it has had several good consequences.
- Spaz demonstrates that making things is good, and sharing how you make them is better.
- Spaz is a necessary counter to closed, hidden technologies. Spaz must always be open.
- The value of Spaz does not lie in the judgements of others, but in the process of building it, and the enjoyment derived by those who use it.
- We welcome anyone who wishes to participate in the Spaz Project with open arms, as long as they understand and respect the purposes of the project.
- The Spaz project values clear and open communication between participants.
This is how I think software should be made. If you agree, I hope you’ll consider supporting what we’re doing in a way you see fit. We always need help!
Thank you for making Spaz far more than I could have imagined.
No more travels for me until SXSW in March, I believe. I’m far too tired.
Did I say that? I actually knew very well that a week later, I would be traveling to San Jose for ZendCon 09. Foolish me.
I spoke at ZendCon on Building Desktop RIAs with JavaScript and PHP. I’ve given this talk other places, but this time I showed off some fun PHP-powered jQuery within Titanium. Here’s a snippet:
<script type="text/php">
/**
* run the passed function when DOM Ready event runs
*/
$jQuery()->ready( function () use (&$jQuery) {
/**
* set some CSS properties
*/
$jQuery('#phpjQ')->css('display', 'none')
->css('background-color','#333')
->css('padding','10px')
->css('border','2px solid #000');
/**
* bind a delegated click event to the passed function
*/
$jQuery('#invokePHP')->live('click', function () use (&$jQuery) {
/**
* set the text color and reveal
*/
$jQuery('#phpjQ')->css('color', 'red')->slideToggle(500);
} );
} );
</script>
Unlike some others, I only participated halfway in CodeWorks 09, doing the east coast leg of Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C., and New York City. It was an enjoyable adventure, and I liked being able to try different approaches in my talks and see what worked best.
I was able to record audio with the voice memo app on my iPhone. Getting hour-long recordings off is a bit of an adventure – they refuse to appear in the voice memo playlist in iTunes, so you have to find the files in the MobileSync backups folders and do some renaming work – but they turned out pretty well.
No more travels for me until SXSW in March, I believe. I’m far too tired.
Ed Finkler is a web application developer, security expert, graphic designer, and dabbling musician. He works for CERIAS at Purdue University. His opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
Photo by Terry Chay
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