Hey everyone!
Sorry for letting you wait - but here is that much wanted update on what my plans for Qwired are.
Private Stuff
The past few months a lot of things have changed for me. I started my own company in August and I'm spending most of my time to start everything up. Other than that I had to manage a few things within the family and my dog died.
With all this happening I did not have any spare time to work on Qwired as you might have noticed. Unfortunately Qwired was my "pet project" to learn Qt - so a lot of internals are far from perfect - and it would require a lot of time to turn Qwired into a perfect, absolutely stable product.
Original Wired/Wired 2.0
After my first efforts to make a better protocol for Qwired, Zanka Software - the creator of the original Wired - decided to switch to a new protocol (Wired 2.0), thus leaving Qwired and other 3rd party software locked out. Basically for Qwired this would mean switching the whole protocol stack - and that's a lot of work.
A lot of people asked me if Qwired will ever support the Wired 2.0 protocol. The answer is: no.
So, is there a future for Qwired?
I want to be honest with you: It does not make much sense to "fix" the current Qwired source code in an attempt to make it a stable software. Even if I spent a lot of time on that, the protocol would have to be switched at some point, and that would mean a major split in the community.
"What now?" you might ask. Well, I will mark the project as inactive/deprecated and leave it on Google Code as it is right now. I learned a lot by writing it and it was a lot of fun, but like I said, it does not make sense to fix it.
But don't cry now. I have some good news, too!
Now that I have my own company, I can decide what I do with the majority of my time. I thought a lot about Qwired and the general BBS (Hotline/Carracho/KDX) approach - but I think that will always be a niche for a small number of communities and users.
To be successful with the BBS approach, it has to solve more general problems and be easier to use. It should be extendable with plugins. It should run on all large platforms (including iOS). It should be secure and have a simple protocol. It should solve a concrete problem for its users. But most importantly - it should give you a tingly feeling and be fun to use.
Stay tuned for Qwired's successor. We are departing from Wired here.
~ Basti
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Kommentare zum Post (Atom)
Good luck man! Hope it works out for you as you want!
AntwortenLöschenThank you! :)
AntwortenLöschenFuck Wired :) You rule!
AntwortenLöschenThx for the work, i hope we will see in some month the new BBS you are talking about ... Working with plugins, secure, simple and multi-platform OS
AntwortenLöschenHave you consider taking over the KDX project? Maybe email the KDX guy (Adam Hinkley) and offer to take it over. From his website, he is looking for someone "suitable" to take over. It doesn't seem like anyone offered yet as the offer is still there: http://www.haxial.com/
AntwortenLöschenKDX is pretty good and has all the bells and whistles. It just needed to be updated with a nicer looking interface. That is the number one complaint about KDX, the ugly default UI.
KDX is cross platforms, but the OSX client needs to be updated to work on MacOS 10.6 and up since Apple removed the transport protocal in Leopard.
There is a KDX linux server, and it works pretty well, maybe needs a little work to make it equal to the Windows version, and some work to port the linux server to OSX. And lastly, I don't think there's a linux client, so that's the only thing that maybe needs the most work, but that you can take your time with it as demand for linux client is most likely very low.
@Mayamaniac:
AntwortenLöschenYeah I did, but no thanks. KDX is a mess and I don't have the time, energy or interest to continue that project. It's less work to re-make something from scratch.
There must be a reason why Adam Hinkey gave up on it, and I guess it's the same reason Carracho, Hotline, Qwired and soon Wired never went somewhere.
I think this kind of software needs to solve a "real" problem. And you have to do it right. Plus I think their biggest problem was that it was were targeted at a very small group of people.
One thing that totally annoyed me with all BBS communities was their mentality; their "need to share files". Maybe it's just me, but for secure file sharing there are many better solutions, like SFTP. But oh noes! It's too complex and hard to set up! One argument that I often hear in response is: "But I want to message and chat with the users!".
Tell you what, I have not seen a single Wired server where people actually communicated. All BBS systems where abused beyond repair to pirate files. And that was true for (Q)Wired as well.
There is no point in creating yet another Hotline(-like) clone. It will go down the drain like all others. Qwired was an experiment, some pet project to learn Qt and C++. I learned a lot. That was in 2008.
File sharing once was the main argument for Hotline. And there were hundreds of servers out there just with that. Now there is BitTorrent, SFTP and a lot of other good protocols which do the job more effectively and securely.
My main interest is in the idea of communities. Small groups of people who have similar interests. And it shouldn't matter if they are on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or iOS. Or just have a web browser. You should be able to stay in touch.
Sounds like you want to build another social network. I think Facebook and many other social network sites already has it covered in terms of communications within a community. It is definitely cross platform since you can have a Facebook app on your iOS or android device.
AntwortenLöschenI suggested KDX because it is an already working solution, just needs to be updated a little it. So I didn't think it would be a lot of work, but I could be very wrong. Maybe you can take it over and look at the codes and learn from Hinkley's mistakes.
.. or not.
But whatever you decide to do, good luck.
Thanks!
AntwortenLöschenI've written software for the past 10 years and the biggest problem with KDX is the fact that it's based on Carbon API. Remember that it was a OS 9 app originally. All new applications today use the Cocoa API (native for OS X).
So basically to make it work in all it's glory again you'd have to port it over to Cocoa, and that's basically writing it again from scratch. And that's something I wouldn't want to do even if I was getting paid for it.
Besides that, there are a lot of things that you (normally) don't need (like single file based permissions).
Oh, about the social network thing. Naw. I deleted my account on Facebook a few months ago.
What I always really liked about Hotline was the fact that you could have friends stay in your servers. And most of the time it wasn't about file sharing, but communicating in real time and having some kind of "culture" on a server with people you get to know.
Like I said. I think that the BBS approach has to be tweaked a bit to make it work for the masses. Then it could be a truly cool tool for everyone.
http://imgur.com/CVUtM.png
AntwortenLöschen:)