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Spaz has been around a long time: since early 2007, which I think makes it 77 in Internet Years. It’s been a while since I started playing with the Twitter API in RealBasic, and later under AIR after I saw the Pownce desktop client and wanted to make my app look cool like it.

A lot has happened since then. A lot of cool stuff with Spaz, and lot of cool stuff for me, and a lot of sometimes cool and sometimes not so cool stuff with Twitter. Now we have a desktop client, still on AIR, and a native mobile client for webOS. Spaz isn’t SUPAR POPULAR, and it’s not proved to be anything but a giant time and money sinkhole, but it’s been a very fun ride.

Through all of this, Spaz has stuck with open technologies: JavaScript, HTML and CSS. We’ve done so because we’re dedicated to true openness and transparency. The Spaz Statement of Purpose spells out the project’s reason for being. And in the light of Twitter’s moves to make the microblogging client scene more of a closed monoculture¹, the significance of Spaz as a counter to closed technologies is greater than ever.

After some recent events – a big career move for me, some horseshit policy changes by Apple, and some disappointing moves by Twitter – I decided we needed to assess where Spaz is headed. So, like any good open source project guy, I went to IRC: I called a meeting on Freenode in #spaz. Turnout was encouraging, and we made some important decisions.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

Most urgent: implementation of OAuth/xAuth by June 1

In June, Twitter is shutting off HTTP Basic Auth support. For client apps to function, they must start using OAuth or xAuth. Spaz Desktop has been approved to use xAuth, an OAuth variant where the user enters their username and password, and the server exchanges these for an OAuth access token. This means we can support a more typical user experience, but don’t have to store credentials anywhere — we just store the access token.

Earlier this week I added support in the SpazCore Twitter library to authenticate with an OAuth access token instead of Basic Auth. This should allow apps using SpazCore to use either Basic Auth (for systems that still support it, like StatusNet) or OAuth/xAuth. Much more needs to be done, though, to get Spaz Desktop and Mobile ready.

Short term: get Spaz Desktop 0.10 out the door in June

The Spaz 0.9 branch, which is the development branch for 0.10, has been stuck in dev for far too long. The codebase has been refactored considerably, and a number of cool features either have been implemented or are planned, but it needs to actually get ready and usable. We need a push, and assistance from a number of motivated folks who are willing to put the time in. Our 0.10 milestone entry on spaz.lighthouseapp.com outlines the various tasks that need to be completed.

Longer term:

1. Move Spaz Desktop from AIR to Titanium Desktop by October 2010

I’ve been a big fan of Appcelerator’s Titanium for a long time, and their Desktop product offers a compelling alternative to AIR for these reasons:

• Titanium is a true open platform: open source with a liberal license
• JavaScript is fully a first-class citizen in terms of language support²
• Titanium allows leveraging Ruby, Python or PHP
• Better Linux support
• Web Worker support
• Full interaction with external processes
• Native installers for each supported platform that includes the runtime

The big knock I see against Titanium is poor documentation, and that’s something I really hope Appcelerator works to rectify.

All in all, though, Titanium is a better fit for us, technology and philosophy-wise. Porting to Titanium is probably about 20 hours of work as it stands now.

2. Start development of web-based mobile/tablet client

I really like powerful mobile devices, and I really like multitouch tablet devices like the iPad. What I don’t like are the restrictions being placed on developers by companies that refuse to be transparent about their policies. I think the way around that is to make a great mobile/multitouch web app.

A web app will also make Spaz available to all devices with mobile webkit browsers. It would run on Android, Palm webOS, and likely BlackBerry and Nokia devices (I’m not super familiar with those, but I believe they have webkit browsers now or will soon).

While Spaz will be a hosted web application, it will still be FOSS, and anyone would be able to get the source and set up their own install. In this sense, it would be an interesting complement to StatusNet.

If folks are motivated to create native clients for their preferred devices, that’s definitely a possibility — either with a wrapper system like PhoneGap, or a native UI system like Titanium Mobile. It just would not be, at least initially, a primary goal.

What about webOS? Not sure right now. It requires dedicated folks who will keep up with it. Nick Carter has helped a lot, but we need more help, and/or we need to leverage the stuff we do in the web-based mobile client. That may necessitate moving away from Mojo as a framework, though. Palm’s dev relations team has indicated that they are interested in making web apps first class on their system, though, and I suspect they’ll have some interesting stuff to make that possible.

3. Target StatusNet as a top-tier service

StatusNet has always been a favorite service of mine. They match our principles, and I think Spaz as a FOSS client and StatusNet as a FOSS service complement each other well. StatusNet needs better clients, and I think Spaz is decently positioned to be a part of that. So, I think we should create a StatusNet API library to support any StatusNet-specific features available, and implement support for this in Spaz.

We should also consider other services, like Facebook and RSS feeds. The first step would be developing SpazCore libraries for these.

How to help

If you’re interested in helping with Spaz, here’s what you can do:

• Read our Statement of Purpose and Diversity Statement
• Read “How Can I Participate in the Spaz Project?”
• Talk to us about what you’re interested in doing
• Make a commitment to putting in a certain amount of time every week. Even a half-hour a week helping with user support is a big help.

You don’t have to be a programmer. We will work with you to learn new skills. All you have to be is interested in building something cool with us.

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:

1. Spaz webOS will cost $2 to download in App Catalog markets that support payments. Right now the only market that supports payments is the US. It will be free in all other markets.
2. Spaz will still be completely open source. The full source code will always be available.
3. I will not stop users from packaging and installing Spaz webOS themselves. In fact, I encourage it! I always need more testers, designers and developers. Hacking, patching, and messing with Spaz are fully endorsed. If you can’t help in one of these ways, consider donating to the SpazCore project.
4. Revenue made from paid App Catalog downloads will be used to support development and offset equipment and hosting costs. I’ve never made any money from Spaz, and despite some generous donations over the past couple years, I’m still well in the red. I don’t do this for the money (obviously), but lightening the burden and compensating myself and other people who have given their time for Spaz is reasonable, I think.

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:

1. 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.
2. Spaz demonstrates that making things is good, and sharing how you make them is better.
3. Spaz is a necessary counter to closed, hidden technologies. Spaz must always be open.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

Yesterday I put together a short survey that asked some questions about what people would be willing to pay for Spaz webOS. It’s been my plan all long to change a small fee (when possible — you can’t yet in the Palm App Catalog) for Spaz webOS, and use the revenue to support further development. Since I believe strongly that Spaz must be an open, transparent project, here are the results so far from 145 responses:

• PDF of Spaz webOS Pricing Survey Response Summary data

…and here are some comments on the results:

What is the most you would pay to purchase Spaz in the Palm App Catalog?

From doing a little math on this, it seems like $2 is the optimal price point in terms of revenue generation, followed closely by $3.

• PDF of “revenue potential” data

What 1-3 features would make you more likely to purchase Spaz in the app catalog?

First off, lots of people ignored the request to pick 1-3, which isn’t surprising (you couldn’t set a max number of choices). That being said, 4 items were far and away the most popular choices

1. Faster Performance (56%)
   Spaz does seem to perform slower than comparable apps. Part of this is because we use a combined timeline, and therefore it takes longer to build results. We also initially requested a LOT more messages from Twitter at startup than comparable apps, and processing them takes more time. We’ve lowered the default numbers (you can up them in prefs), but it’s still higher.

   We’ve also had some CPU usage issues. Those have been dramatically lowered since initial release, but there’s probably more we can do. This shows up especially while processing new messages.

   The other issue I think this response refers to is sluggish scrolling speed. This one perplexes me a bit, but I’m guessing we may be running into performance limits of the Pre’s webkit renderer. We’re going to do some experiments with stripping out CSS styling and markup on our timelines to see if the scroll speed improves in either case. If so, we will need to modify how we style and/or build the markup for our timeline.

2. Direct uploading to image hosting services like Twitpic (54%)
   This was really close to #1, which tells you how badly the lack of direct file upload APIs in webOS is hurting devs. What’s most frustrating is that the email-based workarounds actually took longer to implement than direct uploads would — we already have plenty of code from the desktop app we could have adapted. Here’s another plead to Palm to please expose the file upload APIs to 3rd-party developers ASAP!

3. New message notifications even if the app is closed (42%)
   I’ve heard this a lot. I kind of assumed people would just leave an app open if they wanted it still running, but how I use things isn’t necessarily how others will. One consequence of implementing this will be reduced battery life, so we will need to be careful about it. Note that Palm recommends not doing background network requests more than 15min per hour. We won’t exceed that if and when we do implement this.

4. Facebook support
   This one kinda surprised me. I only added it as a bit of an afterthought, but I suppose it makes sense, especially since there’s not a good native Facebook app for the Pre. I actually know very little about the Facebook API and am not super duper excited about building for their walled garden, but if someone wants to build a SpazCore lib for it, we’ll probably implement something.

Also of note were some of the “Other” responses. They included:

• “More optimized code (use less cpu!)”
  This falls under Faster perf, fo sho.

• “tweet with google maps link to current location”
  This is on the list to get implemented

• “hit user pic in timeline to @reply”
  We’re going to implement something that lets you do actions on a message without going to the detail view. Kinda sucks right now.

• “low power consumption”
  The way you do that is to make fewer network requests. This responder will not want background checking, then 8)

• “more identica/laconica support”
  I’d like to see this happen too. If you want it to happen, volunteering to code a Laconica-specific API (or somehow scraping up funding to sponsor development) would help us out a lot. We don’t have time to do much with non-Twitter APIs right now.

• “Livejournal support”
  Seems like a microblogging client isn’t a good match for this, but if we add ping.fm support, you should be able to post to LJ through that. As for reading LJ posts, I think RSS feed support would allow that.

• “It needs a non-offensive name before I would purchase it anywhere”
  We had to get one of these, although I’m surprised we only got one in nearly 150 responses. It’s not changing. Read the FAQ. Sorry!

• “Since last 2 updates it really drains my battery. LOVE it’s look and feel though.”
  These are the kinds of things we need to get reported to us. Can’t fix it if you don’t report it. Go to our support site and file an issue, please. Please make sure Spaz is the only culprit involved, though.

• “Direct blip.fm support (streaming via clicking a link)”
  That would be interesting. If someone’s willing to look into it dev-wise, I have no issue with it.

• “Why? When tweed is free. And there’s more twitter apps to come.”
  No applications are allowed to charge for apps at the moment. That will change in the future, though. I wouldn’t assume Tweed will remain free, but I have no idea what their plans are.

• “Copy and paste”
  Talk to Palm, dude. 8)

• “Change the name!!!”
  Okay, maybe we got another one, but this didn’t claim I was making fun of physically or mentally disabled people. Sorry, not changing.

• “None”
  This surprised me a little. You could have written “shits money and cleans my house.” Surely that would make you more likely to buy it, yes?

Spaz 0.5.0 went out to the Palm Pre App Catalog today. The coolest new thing is image posting support for TweetPhoto, Twitpic, yfrog and Twitgoo. While webOS still doesn’t have a generic file uploading service that third parties can use, these services support email posting of images, so we were able to build a workable solution using that. It’s not optimal, and as soon as webOS supports file uploads we’ll be there with support for even more services, but it works for the time being.

The other major enhancement in 0.5.0 is with notifications. Previously Spaz on webOS had just used “banner” notifications when new items were loaded, which appear and disappear quickly on the screen. Lots of users asked for what are called “dashboard” notifications in Spaz, though, which are like the ones you get with the email app: an icon is displayed in the corner of the screen, and if you tap it, a larger dashboard appears with more information. These notifications are persistent – they won’t go away until you dismiss them by swiping or tap on them to bring up the Spaz card.

All of these enhancements are available to other webOS developers as well. Because Spaz is open-source with a liberal New BSD-style license, you can use code from Spaz or the SpazCore libraries in your own apps. So if you want to do email-based photo posting to Twitter like Spaz does, you can! And although you are not obligated to tell us, if you do use our code, we’d love to hear about it.

As always, if you have problems, questions or suggestions, talk to us at our Tender-driven support site.

Folks who got the fancy lad Palm® Pre™ on opening day found the App Catalog chock full of superapps. One of them is Spaz, a ground-up rewrite of the award-winning desktop application I created for the Adobe AIR platform using pure HTML+JavaScript. Getting Spaz on webOS™ has been a big undertaking for me, and the process has certainly had it’s ups and downs. But I’m proud of the fact that we shipped a truly open source, transparent app on the first day of a new platform.

But much like Spaz on the desktop, this is not a revenue generator for the project. Everyone who works on the Spaz project is a volunteer, and we rely on motivated folks to help us make cool software. It doesn’t need to be a huge commitment — even just getting involved in the discussion and coming up with ideas is a big help. But here’s where we need help the most:

Coding

While I intend to be the lead on Spaz for webOS™ for a while, I really could use help — I’m working in my free time, and that’s pretty limited with a family and a day job. The full source code of Spaz for webOS™ is available on GitHub, and people who want to help make new features happen are encouraged to check it out.

Even if you’re not well-versed in webOS™ coding, if you have a good JavaScript background (or don’t and are just interested in developing one), we need help to build up SpazCore, our component library that drives Spaz for webOS™, and will drive all our projects in the future. Hacking on SpazCore requires no knowledge of webOS™.

Support

We have a brand new, very awesome support site at http://spaz.tenderapp.com/ which is sponsored by the awesome folks at ENTP. We need to direct people there, and we need to get involved in helping them there. We also should build up the FAQ/Knowledge base. In addition, identifying folks on Twitter who are trying Spaz or having issues and pointing them to the support site is very important.

Advocacy

Do you like Spaz? Why? First off, let us know — I’d like to build a repository of positive mentions like that. In addition, telling people about Spaz and encouraging them to check it out is great. Hwoever, this needs to be done in a nice, non-abusive, non-spammy way, and we always need to respect other applications and their developers. THIS IS NOT A COMPETITION — it’s making people aware of quality alternatives to closed, non-transparent software.

Design/UI

I’m an opinionated fellow and rather controlling of how the Spaz apps look, but I also know there are better designers and UX experts than me. If you’re interested in helping with design and UI work on Spaz — including additional themes — I’d love to hear your ideas.

What About the Desktop?

You are not forgotten. Spaz’s desktop client is long in the tooth, and we have Big Plans for a full rewrite based on SpazCore. That’s long-term though, and in the interim work is still being done on the current Spaz codebase, including adding multi-account support and improving filtering capabilities. We also intend to transition away from AIR to the Titanium platform.

So if you want to stop bitching in your Twitter account and actually make things better, here’s your change. Drop me a line at spaz@funkatron.com and we’ll sort out the best way for you to kick ass.