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I'm Back / Status Update (January 3, 2006)

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John T. Haller
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I'm Back / Status Update (January 3, 2006)

Howdy all! I'm back in New York City after my holiday travels to visit friends and family. I hope everyone had a great holiday season and that your new year is off to a great start. I thought I'd drop a note in the forums and give everyone a status update on a few things.

First off, thanks for the well wishes for the holidays and for the 'feel better' sentiments. Smile I wound up having bronchitis or something like it for about 4 of the last 6 weeks and nearly visiting the ER... at least partially due to overworking (like pulling the all-nighters leading up to the Suite release). Sadly, it resulted in me being unable to have Thanksgiving with my family for the first time in my life. But I did get better in time for Christmas and get to see my folks, sisters and nieces and nephews, which was great. Smile ... before having a bit of a relapse the last week which slightly curtailed my New Year's plans Sad

Second, as mentioned in a couple other threads (like this one), I've completed the updates to the PortableApps Menu code that resolve the GPL issues I'd mentioned earlier. I've got a colleague reviewing it and will be releasing it Thursday in the forums. If there are any Delphi 2006 folks out there, I'd appreciate a once-over to ensure it all compiles correctly and includes all the necessary files. It's about 1,000 lines of code and doesn't use anything other than the built-in Delphi bits and standard Windows API calls so it should be pretty straight-forward for folks. I'd also like folks to test it to ensure it introduced no bugs over the 1.0.2 Beta 2 release. As a bonus, it includes the pre-cursors to the theming and localization support I've discussed previously... so folks can start getting their feet wet with those features. More detail will be posted with the release.

Third, I'll be posting updated versions of Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc this week to update to the new releases and include a new installer that checks for free space on the device and has better feedback in terms of installation progress.

Fourth, I'll also be posting the first bits about Portable Apps Format including what is supported now and what will be supported in the future. Basically, there's a lot that can be done with it and a lot of things that will be added as it matures. I'd like to get some opinions from other developers and users to ensure that we have all our bases covered going forward.

Fifth, donation levels jumped a bit after the 1.0 release of the PortableApps Suite to the point of possibly having a bit of extra money to play with (which is a very nice 1st). For those that don't know, all donation money goes towards hosting bills... not to me. The extra funds could allow me to bring a downloads server online to be able to host some freeware apps. Which brings me to the next point...

Sixth, as the platform has gotten popular (the 1.0 release already surpassed 1/3 of a million downloads and we've recently served up our 10 millionth portable app) many commercial application providers have expressed interest in bringing their applications to the platform... especially once I release the PAF guidelines. For some other apps that lots of folks like and don't have an open source equivalent (and have been requested many times), the possibility has also arisen for me to be able to get permission from some rather big software houses to create and distribute a portable package of their applications for free. I'd just need a place to host em. I've already specced out a download server that would provide use with lots of space for downloads, around 6TB of bandwidth over a dedicated connection, backups/managed support/etc and cost under $300 a month. I was planning on using my own funds (borrowed, actually) to support this initially... but with the uptick in donations, I may be able to give my overtaxed credit a break, but I wanted to be sure it was ok with the community first. Thoughts?

Seventh, I've started adding some new folks to the team here. This includes translators with partial admin access as well as some new moderators. I still have invitations out to a few others and a few more to send out... but I'll be making an announcement in the forums soon and providing an introductions thread to announce it to the wider community. This will be happening over the next several days. Drupal is, unfortunately, not as straight-forward about allowing folks to moderate specific things... so a bit more hacking is necessary to get things working correctly. *Please* don't ask to be a moderator or suggest who should be in this thread as that's not the purpose of this topic.

And Eighth, I'm putting the finishing touches on some agreements with hardware and software vendors that will allow this site to become self-sufficient and let me work on it full time. It will also allow this site to be able to fund some work on open source projects, which has been one of my big goals for it all along. I've given some details about this to a couple developers, but I'll hopefully be able to make an announcement in the next few weeks along these lines and get the ball rolling on it.

Ok... I think that about sums up the updates. Any input from everybody is encouraged. For now... I'm off to have a bite of dinner and code some more...

Regards,
John

Ryan McCue
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Welcome back John!

*note to self: design massive banner to put up at airport for John*

  1. Meh?? I never even knew you were sick Pardon Anyway, hope you had a great Christmas/New Year and hope you are back with full health Smile
  2. Yay!
  3. Yay!
  4. Yay! I'm itching to get the full specs Smile
  5. Great, you could go out and buy yourself a Christmas present Wink
    *note to self: donate money to John*
  6. This sounds great, any chance you have considered Amazon S3?
  7. OoOoO, I wonder who Wink
  8. Hardware and software vendors? Self-sufficient? Fund projects? DEVELOPERS? MEH??????Shift-/??

And that sums it up for me too, I guess I'd better get to work on die Deutsch Arbeitsbuch Biggrin
And Lilina *le sigh* Wink
----
Ryan McCue
Santa: Ho Ho Ho!
Kim: Yes, thank you Santa, I am.
(Kath and Kim)

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

John T. Haller
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Thanks...

Thanks, man...

1. Yeah, I'm getting there. Trying to get some more rest.
4. It'll be a start of the specs, but I'll need everybody's thoughts before finalizing.
5. Nope. I made a decision that donations were only going to be for hosting and related expenses and, if they exceeded this, I'd use em to fund some development. I've invested the last 2 years and quite a bit of money because I honestly think this can become a successful, self-sustaining, ongoing project that can outdo what could be done by a closed-source company.
6. I looked at it, but it's $200 per TB of bandwidth... more expensive than I can get elsewhere. I'm looking at 6TB per month for $273 where I'm pricing things out. (Incidentally, we're getting close to 20TB a month of downloads for all the open source projects)
8. Indeed. It's taken a while to get to this point... but it's almost there.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Simeon
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some ideas

3. A good idea. I often missed the free-space-check. Does this include an adjustment of the progress bar of the backup feature. If you run it without the 7zip window, it fools you by saying "Im ready soon!!!" but it isnt!:-(
4. Nice!
5. Congratulations !
6. I think adding some distinguished closed-source apps would be a great leap forward. Sooo many people have asked about this; so the needs are there. IMHO, this would give this site a boost for sure.
7. Foreign language support is another long awaited feature. Im very pleased to hear about it becoming ready.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

Steve Lamerton
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Well,

1. Wow missed that, glad you're better and that you had a good New Year.
2. Oooh, can't wait to see it!
3. Nice, I've had at least one person ask me why the install was broken when there drive was jammed full of junk, honestly drives are so cheap these days I don't know why people don't upgrade to something bigger than there old 64mb drive Wink
4.Excellent, I guess you'll set up a discussion topic?
5.Congratulations, the projects deserves the funds.
6. Sounds good, but it would lead to more people requesting closed source apps.
7. Looking forward to the new moderators.
8. Self funding open source, wow this has grown since we were on MozillaZine hasn't it Smile

Yours

Steve Lamerton

Frank D. Hubeny
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Hope you feel better real soon

Hello John;

Sorry to hear you were under the weather. Hope it clears up real soon.

Nice information you shared with us. I hope it all works out. I like the fact that perhaps you may be able to do this full time and even are going to be able to add some people to the team.

This is a great project or group of projects. The proof may well be that people are wanting to add their items to it. Both closed and opened source. It is my home page.

Frank D. Hubeny

mena
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You're the Greatest!!!

Hi John,
I hope you feel better now,
I have never in my life heared of anyone so dedicated to an idea (a great one I must say)You deserve all the admiration you get and more!
What you are doing is a revolution!Kind regards, mena

Loui5
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Your health, above all

You don't need me to tell you, John, but you should put your health first.

I second everyone else's good wishes for you and I thank you for all the work that you do with this project.

tanisthalon
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Some enticing news there....

Glad to hear you are well now John. All the points you made are extremely interesting. Really looking forward to what the 'PortableApps Community' can offer the world this year. I am and sure everyone else appreciates not just you, but everyone involved contributes to the community.

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John T. Haller
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Almost forgot...

As part of #6 (Getting a downloads server), I'll be able to give hosting allocations to developers for their projects so they have a place to host the downloads of earlier test versions before they're solid enough to be place in the Apps Directory and on the main SourceForge project. This has always been the biggest thing lacking community-wise since signing up for your own SF project is a bit of work and the main PortableApps SF project wasn't equipped to be a test ground for early works (I always host mine outside of SF before they're ready for general use).

Now, developers here will be able to get their own FTP accounts with their own storage allocations for starting new apps up! Smile

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Ryan McCue
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Oh, and while we are on the subject

of downloads, John, can you change all the links from prdownload to download.sf.net as this auto-redirects to the new page.
Thanks.
----
Ryan McCue
Santa: Ho Ho Ho!
Kim: Yes, thank you Santa, I am.
(Kath and Kim)

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

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