On
25 July 2010 with 2 comments
What began as a project motivated by the Open Collaboration Services API has really come a long way since it began as a concept submission to KDE’s openDesktop competition. This project was a unique concept for people to share and record what they were working on. Not about showcasing your latest creation – no, rather it is about showcasing the processes behind it: the different ideas, the development, and things that didn’t quite work out in the end. This project is for people who make stuff. People who constantly have ideas bouncing around, juggle their time between various projects and start more than they finish. This project is called WIPUP. WIPUP is a way to conveniently share, critique and track progress on your projects.
WIPUP attained an important milestone today – its beta release. It’s now available for the public to use. WIPUP is a "web 2.0" technology application, to use the cliche term. However more importantly it’s the infrastructure behind and towards a unique Social Desktop tool. For those unfamiliar with what the Social Desktop embodies, allow me to quote:
[The] core idea of the Social Desktop is to connect to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself.
WIPUP is (in terms of this final goal) still in its infancy – there is no desktop client (yet), my plans for KDE integration are still on the drawing board, and no currently existing API implementation. But more important is what does exist, which is the tool – the platform behind all of these future possible interfaces which provides added convenience and flexibility towards any workflow. As such, I’m immensely happy to share this beta with all of you and invite you all to check it out and start using it. WIPUP is also open source and free software – so any interested developers (or anybody wanting to contribute) are welcome to join as well!
On
21 July 2010 with 2 comments
This coming Sunday (25th) the first WIPUP beta version will get released. I’ve been working hard to ensure that this first beta truly will be feature-complete and bug-free. I was quite delighted this morning when I found a few Brazillian game developers had tried out WIPUP (and a few of its live-only features succesfully) for an RPG they were making – it was all in Portuguese, but it was a great feeling nonetheless. I hope more people can find use for WIPUP and enjoy using it just as much as I have.
One of the reasons I developed WIPUP was to be used as a long-term infrastructure for myself – a way to log and see my progress through time. A phrase I like to use here is insight through hindsight. This of course means that since this is the first so-called stable release of WIPUP, I’m going to take a break from developing it (desktop clients, APIs and the such will have to wait) and resume my personal, more creative projects.
I’ve spent the past week porting over the remains of The ThoughtScore Project’s original thread on BlenderArtists to the WIPUP Project. I shall spend my time over the next week to pick up all those Blender save files that have spread across my hard disk and get ready to resume work on ThoughtScore.
I’m also starting a new composition. After every composing session I shall snapshot the score and perhaps a short clip of me playing what I’ve got so far. You can check out the WIPUP project for it.
Also if you need a webdev job, you can ask the folks at the company I’m now working for, OmniStudios.
On
19 July 2010 with 4 comments
For the uninitiated, EyeOS is a free, open-source desktop implementation right in the browser. I was recently playing around with my EyeOS installation that I forgot I had installed a while back (v1.x) and like what most people do when they try out a new system, I decided to see what other themes they have.
Turns out they have an Oxygen theme! It’s a little dated but I must say I’m impressed. Very impressed.
Now all I have to do is find a practical personal use of EyeOS! Perhaps it might replace a few of my cobbled series of other cloudish hacks.
On
15 July 2010 with no comments
I decided to delay the statistics-review post for WIPUP 27.06.10a because a recent update to the dashboard now shows view statistics on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis – the results were quite surprising:
As you can see WIPUP is clearly one of our most active projects, with quite a decent kudos:subscriptions:updates ratio compared to the others. However when looking at the activity, we notice something rather interesting – the increase in views is not a sustained increase. It’s a spike whenever there is an update. Looking at my personal WIPSpace we can attribute the initial spike up to almost 200 to the 27.06.10a release itself. The very next day, with no updates, views returned to a pathetic zero.
The even larger spike was quite an oddity. On the 1st of June, one of my less relevant posts (about cooking) was aggregated onto Planet Larry, which sort of explains it (despite a 1 day time lag occuring before the spike) – but further investigation shows that my update about buying the C++ Qt book received a uniqely larger amount of views. I conclude that where the Planet Larry aggregation helped spark some interest, another equally important factor to the spike was that planet readers decided to read what else was on the blog, which was a post which linked to the programming book update – which was obviously a lot more relevant. All the same, very interesting stuff.
An obvious reason behind the non-sustained views is that WIPUP is largly an unknown entity on the web. Hopefully with more updates (which will come!) I can change this behavior into a steady stream.
In relevant news, the upcoming beta of WIPUP is making rapid progress and should be quite a sweet release.
On
5 July 2010 with no comments
I’ve decided to run a live version of WIPUP alongside the monthly updates and it can be accessed at live.wipup.org. The release announcement can be found here.
I’ve been a busy little bee these few days, starting driving lessons, starting full-time programming work as well as learning C++, and finally finishing my first ever ADOM game. WIPUP’ll be updated regularly with my ongoing projects but hopefully I’ll get a few general articles written for this blog soon. Meanwhile, here’s a really good article I read the other day called The Nerd Handbook.
