infoscape

Starting from today, development in both server and client side can be considered mature and real-life usage will be performed during this and next week in order to ensure that everything works fine.

After that, infoscape 1.4 will be delivered allowing anyone to take advantage of this superb features. For those impatient, here is a brief description of how infoscape Live! will work:

Today, an important bug was found in generic feed loader module of infoscape 1.3. This was causing the application to crash in misterious conditions; but fortunately the problem was quickly isolated and solved, so actually everybody can update its 1.3 version to 1.31 and be safe of unexpected crashes.

As promised, here is the latest piece of the state-of-the-art feed reader infoscape; specially recommended for non-IE users and colorful minds.

Installer size has grown a little bit because of GDI+ redistributable library, which now comes bundled to avoid dependency problems. I hope you like it!

As result of thoughts exposed in previous post and some investigations derived from it, I started developing in PHP a web service called “infoscape live!” which allows on-line channel management and retrieval. This service will be initially hosted in a free web hosting featuring PHP and MySQL support.

After web service interfaces are completely implemented and tested, client side feature will be also developed to get advantage of the service. I expect the whole thing to be finally available for the general public after version 1.4 (1.3 will ship this week as expected with color-coded channels and default browser support)

I consider this the first step to a fully featured collaborative web site for infoscape, so don’t miss the oportunity to be part of it helping in web design/hosting issues.

Once again I found myself acting like a code-addict this weekend, so I decided to do a couple improvements to the infoscape code. The next version will feature:

Regarding the release date, I’m not in a hurry… someday in current or next week.

No more development time has been spent on infoscape since v1.2 delivery, mainly because professional and personal stress experienced by the developer since then.

infoscape still lacks lots of features and lots of things can be still done for it, but not much suggestions or help offers have been recieved up to now… I tried to spread the application as much as I can but webmasters and bloggers doesn’t look very friendly if your application doesn’t appear in the front page of digg or Slashdot.

Looking forward, now I’ll try to summarize what infoscape 1.3 would feature in case I find the time and the support (comments, blog entries, articles, links, diggs, del.ici.ous bookmarks…):

Browsing the web I found some days ago an online project collaboration tool called Basecamp. After creating a free account and working a few minutes with it I found it impressively easy and useful for almost every kind of small project.

Maybe for infoscape it was a little bit too much intrincate to use it for a only-one-person development team, but no doubt I’ll keep this tool in mind for future projects and team activities.

infoscape 1.2 is ready for download. This release is suposed to be the last one in a long time, since not much support has been received and application is useful and stable enough from my point of view. I hope you guys enjoy it!.

Dedicated to Daniel: you will never be completely gone.