Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The future of (the) Universe

First, I want to thank all of my testers. They are amazing. They have bent over backwards (almost literally) for me to help me fix bugs. So far, I think Universe is probably one of the most stable pieces of software that I have written. It feels very complete, mostly because of the help that I have received from my testers.

Second, I wanted to announce that Universe is sitting at version 0.7.3 (alpha), and it is about to be marked feature complete and nearly ready for beta. But...

Third, I am starting a position as a work-to-hire contractor on Palm's (ok... ok... HP, but it will always be Palm to me) WebKit Team. I am very excited.

What does this mean for Universe? I am not 100% certain. I have been told that I may get to continue work on it, since there seems to be enough disconnect from my work and Universe. Let's hope that this is the case. Thankfully, I never wrote a port of WebKit to the webOS Linux platform, so Universe is *just* a Mojo shell ontop of a WebView wrapper which implements WebKit. This might be the distinguishing factor.

Either way, I am going to continue development. Since I have most of my reported bugs fixed (yes, there are a few out there, which I will get dealt with), I am not going to be releasing a new dot release every night like I have been for the past week or two. I am going to focus on going from 0.7.3 (alpha) to 0.8.0 (beta), or even 0.9.0. This will give me some time to figure out what I can and cannot do with Universe. Once I have some sort of direction, I'll post the release to some testers.

This brings up my next point. I have a ton of testers. I've lost count. So, in order to reduce the number of people, I am going to require that to be in the beta one must have submitted at least one bug report or at least one feature request to me via email, Twitter, Facebook or PreCentral and have made me aware of their email address (to make it easier on me).

Anyway, I will post again in the future about what the fate will be. Hopefully something works out!

Twitter: @openmobl (https://twitter.com/openmobl)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/OpenMobl-Systems/176509162391973 (OpenMobl) or https://www.facebook.com/pages/Universe-Web-Browser/149809205071972 (Universe Web Browser)
Email: beta@openmobl.com

Thank you for all of your help!
Donald