The rewrite of the backends in trunk are going well, but slow, since I'm the only person producing code. Still nothing in the 1.0 branch, hopefully I'll find the energy to wrap that up soon. We desperately need more developers. I'd be a lot more motivated if I had two core devs by my side who knew what they were doing. I'm more then willing to spend several days with anybody who wants to learn about PD at the core, so long as it'll give me some help.

After 1.1 is done, I want to implement integration with web services. This includes both social-networks, and document services like google docs. That would tie into a publishing api, that would allow you to share things from apps to various social websites very easily. For example, posting a news article from the feed reader to twitter, delicious, and facebook with one click. Also, a personal website system, where each app will be able to provide a section of the site (such as a blog). The page would be customizable with themes. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but when it's done, it's going to be awesome.

Ok, so we've been working mostly on trunk in the past days. The rewrite of the backends is going well, we just have to finish the database portion of the code, and then we will be able to start rewriting the backends to work with JSON-RPC. We are focusing on security as one of the goals of the rewrite, and I will use penetration testing tools once the rewrite is complete (I've been reading a lot about pentesting in the past month). Hopefully we can find the courage to finish some of the stuff that needs to be done in the 1.0 branch :).

Steven has finished our new site design, it's just a matter of passing it off to me so that I can write the HTML/CSS for it, and intergrate it with the new site. If things go as planned, the new site should be done in a few weeks.

Lastly, we've been thinking of changing our 1.0 release to the 0.9 release. The rewriting of the backends using Zend has opened our eyes to how our backends were put together with duct-tape and chewing gum, and we really don't want that in the 1.0 version. The 1.1 release would be changed to the 1.0 release if this were to happen.

That's about it. If you have any other questions, ask us in our IRC room, or leave a comment to this post.

The Dojo Foundation has recently decided to support Psych Desktop. Our membership with the foundation will improve ties with Dojo. We will be donating some parts of the desktop, such as the sound api, to dojo as a result of this. The membership also will help us reach out to Dojo's community in order to improve the API, and deliver a better developer experience.

This is also a good time to announce that we will be redoing our site very soon. We understand that the forums we have are not very good, and seldom used. Also, a lot of the content is old, and it's good to start from scratch once 1.0 has been released.

Lastly, I'll tell you all what's happening in trunk. At the moment, it's broken because we're re-writing the server-side code completely using the Zend Framework. The new architecture will feature RPC, XHR long polling, and better server-side apis for apps that require server-side code. The 1.0 branch works, which you can get from http://svn.psychdesktop.net/branches/1.0/.

Development in the past month has been slow, but it seems to be picking up gradually. We really do need some more contributors though, so if you're interested, contact us.

It has recently been discovered that Katana IDE does not work after being built. We've fixed this, and have released an application package that you can install from the apps section of the administration panel.

Katana-IDE-fixed.lucid.zip

Installation Instructions:

1. Log into the desktop as a user with the "api.ide" and "desktop.administration" permissions set to "allow".
2. Go to System > Administration > Administration Panel
3. Find the "Katana IDE" app in the list of applications, right click on it, and select 'remove'. When the yes/no dialog appears, select 'yes'.
4. Click on the "Install App Package" button on the toolbar. Click "browse" and select the package.
5. The admin panel should then automatically upload the package. If it does not, click on something other then the upload box.
6. Clear your browser's cache, and refresh the desktop. The IDE should work now.

If you haven't done so already, please make sure you nominate us for the SourceForge Community Choice Awards.

The two categories we want to get into is either "Best Project" or "Most likely to change the world". Please nominate us for both of them.

Thanks!

1.0 Alpha 2 has been released! This version features a drastic amount of changes since alpha1. This is the final alpha version. All releases after this will be beta versions, and there will be more frequent releases.

The reason why we released a day late was because we were experiencing a problem with the build system. This version has optimized versions of the apps that are compressed and merged into one file for faster execution times.

Downloads:

• .tar.gz archive (15.6mb)
• .zip archive (19.5mb)

If all goes as planned, we should be done with alpha2 in two days. The only things left to do is fix IE issues, and mimetype guessing (because the windows port of php does not have good mime support).

This will be the last alpha release. After that we will release beta1, which will feature some minor cosmetic improvements. During the beta stage we will be releasing on a regular basis until all the bugs have been removed.

So the next release will be 1.1. There are a lot of changes going on in that release. Huge changes to the server-side code structure are going on, including taking advantage of the Zend Framework, as well as using Zend's JSON RPC server for communication,which was announced after the dojo-zend partnership. We really could use some help from the community. If you are interested in helping us out, ping psychcf in either IRC or by email.

The IDE has gone through a huge change recently. It now supports syntax highlighting, and a tree to manage the app's files. Take a look:

Hello everybody.
If you have a SourceForge account I would apprecate it if you could nominate Psych Desktop for the SourceForge Communtiy Choice Awards. It will take very little time. Make sure you've logged into SF before clicking on the link below.

The two categories we want to get into is either "Best Project" or "Most likely to change the world". Please nominate us for both of them.

Thank you for showing your support!

Psychcf has been interviewed on the dojo.cast() podcast, a podcast about happenings with dojo. Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the project and want to find out some general info.

[link]