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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:

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?

This is something I’ve been thinking about and working on for a few weeks now. I wanted to post it here both to understand my motivation, and to hear feedback.

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.