Update on Qwired

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