I was planning on sending postcards internationally to anyone I could... even if it cost a fair chunk of the pledge.
The plan for the forums is to use them not only for discussion but also to vote on direction and cosmetic issues (name, logo, syntax targets).
Do you think that giving people access to the forums for the purposes of discussion but without the ability to vote would cause problems?
As for the betas, I agree that even a dollar is significant but I had to find a balance that I felt would work for the pledge rewards. This restriction is only for the first development cycle however; once the public release is done further development will be open to everybody.
There's no planned SaaS component to this. It should primarily all be client-side and interface with established SaaS systems instead of requiring its own.
That is the goal. So much of the functionality is already present in the browser. We can use the browser's Javascript interpreter, tabs, web connectivity, etc. We just have to put these together to create the core. To answer your other post this is how 4K becomes doable... especially since this is a project I want to do so badly.
The idea is that if a company wants to reserve the right to customize, commercialize and close the code they can... but only by supporting the completely open version first.
Yeah, there isn't a very good interface between the events passed to Javascript and IMEs yet... and this causes the headaches with non US/EU input. I had the hidden text field method down as a last ditch workaround.
I do plan on learning as much as possible about the current attempts to do similar projects. But I feel that the current options do not adopt enough of a "get out of the way" approach for me. I'm hoping to write an alternative for those who don't want a browser based eclipse. I've been poking at WebGL for this and I really do think it can help... but I also understand that I may be eating my words here shortly.
I'm hoping to at least make this into something that can grow into something like emacs. There is already Ymacs, though it's not a complete solution at the moment.
Browser support is hit and miss. I'm gambling that it will be much better supported in browsers 6 months from now. The advantage is that it allows the smoothing of all the rough edges normally found in editors. Quick zooming to arbitrary levels, completely smooth scrolling... things that aren't traditionally necessary but make for something that is so much more pleasant to use.
There are some. Bespin is now merged into ace and cloud9 is the actual full-featured (has someplace to save without further integeration) implementation. And cloud9 is sadly not free for non open source projects. I find that they aren't satisfactory for my everyday use.
I'm going to be looking very carefully at Bespin, Ace, CodeMirror and Ymacs. Not sure which, if any, pieces I'll be able to reuse... especially since I'm hoping to move to webGL where appropriate. But I am not going to blindly rewrite pieces that need no such effort.
Agreed. DOM rendering support has gotten really good over the past year. I want to try a different approach that will make everything seem smoother. Also, since with this sort of text editor you want everything to be aligned in a grid the rendering becomes a set of aligned glyphs... so the GPU rendering can be optimized more so than when considering the entire DOM. If there wasn't that simplification I wouldn't even be suggesting this.
It's tough enough making money as an independent developer as is. I really can't afford to work on this as a side project. As for the pie-in-the-sky... reuse as much as possible. With the exception of GPU acceleration everything exists as either side-effects of the implementation (javascript scripting for extensions) or as an available library (dropbox/github integration). Not that I'm saying it is easy... I wouldn't have a Kickstarter otherwise.
Yeah, Bespin was trying a similar approach with regards to rendering. They had a lot more baggage (server side code, workarounds for issues that have now been resolved) that is no longer necessary. They've now merged into Ace though and the rendering approach was scrapped in favor of a DOM-based method. I think this gives it a lot more overhead than is necessary.
GPL was chosen in this case as it was the best way for us to maintain control and fund this as a startup. That final pledge tier wouldn't exist otherwise. As we're trying to do this without large amounts of financial backing it would be difficult to ensure that development stayed open otherwise.
The plan for the forums is to use them not only for discussion but also to vote on direction and cosmetic issues (name, logo, syntax targets).
Do you think that giving people access to the forums for the purposes of discussion but without the ability to vote would cause problems?
As for the betas, I agree that even a dollar is significant but I had to find a balance that I felt would work for the pledge rewards. This restriction is only for the first development cycle however; once the public release is done further development will be open to everybody.