Re: "Should I stay or should I go?"
Reply #30 –
@jax, sure, and I partially agree, this is why I have also a private TODO, but I'm keeping just "unique" details there, not obvious ones like "we want to do another browser almost like a classic Opera". :-P
Lack of communication is way to die alone, this is why I'm considering.... Facebook profile (bleh).
But I would need someone to help with that, for two reasons:
- I'm not a native speaker (and creating ambiguity on PR page would be baaaad, unless that profile would be named something like "Otter - Ideas lost in translation" :-D),
- it simply takes a lot of time, I had such role in one company and I've decided to stick to development only, it took up to one hour per day with just ~200 likes (it was decided that we won't cheat and buy thousands of ghosts or something like that), for monitoring and then replying the same questions all the time (it was profile for hosting page) and writing announcements from time to time (trying to be a bit funny too, like for example using references to The Lord of the Rings - BTW, anyone reads that introduction line for each weekly? :-D).
And I'm already spending a lot of time here, on IRC, replying in issues tracker etc.
We simply need someone for PR, but with knowledge about my plans (I want to prepare such matrix) and time. The only thing I can give in return is gratitude and additional experience in Public Relations. ;-)
It's annoying that we can't go for donations (see last FAQ entry), I've seen too many projects that failed even after collecting lots of money (I'm still curious what exactly happened with KDE Commit Digest after that fund raiser some years ago).
And I don't want to make those who believe in this project to feel betrayed again, to not shatter completely image of classic Opera, to avoid situation when Opera gives only image of betrayal. :-D
But I also know that current approach is painful, but our offering is simply not enough yet, Otter can be called vaporware until most of plans piling for 1.0 will be fulfilled (especially that damn address filed completion ;-)) and I'm extremely strict.
To make it more clear (uh, yeah, I know, I'm a drama queen too), I won't accept any donations until I'll be sure that our goals can be fulfilled (1.0, that is, at least 95% of stuff assigned to it in TODO, github and tons of smaller details). After completing my current liabilities at work (The week of walking deadline (literally), in fact I have two of them, both set to... today :-D) I'm planning to take at least two weeks long break (well, I'm a freelancer, I can take a break anytime, when I want ;-)) to reproduce spike of activity from December.
There are some low hanging fruits like Notes (just copy model used by bookmarks, fine tune, copy bookmarks module, add editing fields, solve proper pasting), notifications (add UI, finish fallback dialog, first version done by bajasoft month ago), complete Cookie policies (concept is proven to work for QtWebKit, needs turning into code, using proxy cookie jars so dialogs asking if specific cookie should be accepted would block only that page, not entire UI) etc. (I'm using my private TODO to track such details).
Also I've contacted leader of QupZilla to ask if he would be interested in solving inevitable issues with QtWebEngine (vanilla version won't be what we need, while having stuff better than QtWebKit in terms of API it will also lack some crucial features or we will need to wait at least one year to get some basics). I was planning to do that from beginning, as soon as it was confirmed that QtWebKit won't have QNetworkAccessManager which was the only way to exploit it's hidden potential (access requests, headers, lots of stuff depends on QNAM in QtWebKit), that is complex topic, those who were on #qtwebengine yesterday know more about this problem.
To conclude, this is project made by people for people, not for money (at least not taking it directly from users, that is another complex topic, I can only assure that I won't accept things like nonsense ads in speed dial) and wanting to communicate with people (but keep in mind that time spent on communicating means less time for coding :-/).