As we continue to improve the BrowserPlus platform, with a focus on making it accessible to more end users (localization), and rock solid, we hope to simultaneously slow things, and speed em' up.
What am I talking about? Well, the platform itself has reached what we hope will be a period of feature stability. There's a vast ocean of untapped potential in terms of the kinds of things you can do with BrowserPlus, without adding new major platform features. So work in the core platform will be focused on making sure BrowserPlus installs cleanly, and runs for anyone out there on a supported system and browser.
What's a Platform Feature?
But don't get confused here, what is a "platform feature"? Well, the fundamental stuff that's common to all services, and the stuff that must be built-in, for instance the distribution, acquistion, and revocation of services - all platform features. Isolation of services in their own process, another platform feature.
Everything else, all the features that a web developer (or most of us, technical and otherwise) may care about, are actually implemented outside the platform, in services. This list includes most of the services that fuel how people perceive and define BrowserPlus: In browser Image manipluation, snazzy desktop notifications, client side compression, motion detection, etc.
Present Focus
Our focus moving forward will be slow and careful refinement of the core platform, and fast and fancy-free nourishment of the growing body of published services for the platform. To aid this goal, we'll turn heavily to you guys, the community. Our first step in this direction is Hack the Browser.
This, at present, is a catalog of open source work that's been done actually applying BrowserPlus to new problems. As a taste that site includes links to in-browser screenshots, by Steve Spencer, or experiments into evolutionary javascript profiling, by Dav Glass, or for the ultra useful, wonky in-browser arcade style tunes based on bloopsaphone by why the lucky stiff.
Join us on IRC
Further, more and more conversations we've been having about BrowserPlus have been on IRC. Admittedly the traffic on our public rooms is still just a trickle, but we dig irc and want to nourish it. Having a place to come and get a real-time response about how to use or extend BrowserPlus seems necessary. So Hack the Browser also features a full searchable archive of all the utterances past and present on our room, at irc.freenode.net #browserplus:
So have a look at all the work going on, and come join us!
