We're going to be holding a meeting in our IRC room on January 2nd, at 1PM EST. The topics we'll cover can be found on our development wiki.

The meeting will be held in our IRC room on freenode, #psychdesktop. If you don't have an IRC client installed, you can use the chat applet on the contact page.

Although this is a developer meeting, you are welcome to give feedback regarding Psych Desktop.

We'll see you there!

I put together a short video showing some things Lucid/Psych Desktop can do.

The video was shot in full 720p, so go take a look.

It's also on youtube, but for some reason it's not showing up in HD.

We're going to post more videos in the future, so feel free to subscribe to the channel.

As we come close to our 1.0 release, I want to hold another developer meeting. I'll let you all know when we have a date and time. It will be held in our IRC channel, #psychdesktop on irc.freenode.net. You can check out the details of the meeting on the trac wiki. Feel free to add any topics you would like us to discuss.

Yesterday, I set some deadlines for the website and the 1.0 release candidate. 1.0-rc1 should be done on January 30th, 2009 (about 7 weeks). There's still a lot of things to be done, but it's mostly just bug fixing, and touchup work. There are only two major features that need to be implemented: streamlined updating, and enhancements to application security. There's some easier tickets that we can assign to people who want to get involved with development, just make sure you've got a Dojo Foundation CLA filed.

The deadline for the new website is this Friday, December 19th. We're going to get the site done earlier so that we have time to test it, and deploy it. I need to make some minor changes to the code, and I'm also going to be working with one of our designers to refine the design for the site. He redid the design, so the one that's in SVN will be thrown out. I'm probably going to post up a link for you all to try it out, so that we can make sure it works perfectly. We're going to switch sites as soon as possible, because the server that hosts the current site is limited on resources (Apache couldn't handle all the requests when we made it onto Ajaxian). The new site will be hosted by Dojo's servers, which are far superior to the current server.

We're also going to start using the forums more once we launch the new site. We really enjoy doing all this cool stuff, but the real reward is when we get to talk, as well as work with others about Lucid. So, we're going to make it a point to discuss all of our ideas in there, and maybe we'll get some really nice ideas from the community.

So, if things go as planned we should have 1.0 wrapped up by the end of January, and we can start working on 1.1. We're going to be rewriting the server-side code, so it would be a great time for new contributors to get involved. As I've said before, we're going to use Zend Framework, as well as Doctrine. The new server code will also make server-side development much easier and cleaner; you will be able to access registries and the filesystem from within PHP with no hassles. I'm hoping that we can get 1.1 out a few months after 1.0, but we'll just have to wait and see how things fall into place.

I should clarify what I said in the last post... We aren't getting rid of the desktop paradigm. I think a well polished desktop is important. However, the goal is not to make a perfect copy of a "real" desktop. It's actually to take the desktop paradigm, and adapt it for the web. I'll also elaborate on what I mean by the "good parts of the web".

The web is a great platform for applications. It's central nature allows for ease of communication. It also makes it easy to share things because it is publicly accessible. Lastly, the web is great because it's accessible from everywhere, including mobile phones. That said, current desktops such as gnome, windows, etc. lack the ability to do incorporate this in their design. What I want to do in Lucid is incorporate these aspects of the web into the desktop.

An example would be the phone interface that we will be working on in 1.1. It will provide an alternate interface that allows javascript-enabled devices with limited screen real estate to run the full-blown desktop applications. Because the web is accessible from phones, we can actually pull this off. The current solutions, however, can't because of their decentralized nature.

Another example is the public frontend that we wanted. Each user of the desktop would have a public website. Applications would be able to publish things to the personal website. For example, I could have a photos application that would allow me to publish a photo album that I could send to my friends. Current desktops can't do this; you need to upload them to something like Flickr. Because Lucid is on the web though, we can. That said, I'm not against syncing with Flickr, it's just that I feel a seamless integration with the web leads to a more usable interface.

So, hopefully that cleared up the last post. I do think that having things like an office suite are important, but I'm not going to limit us to making a carbon-copy of a desktop environment. I want to expand upon that, and make it a desktop for the web, and not just a web-based desktop.

I have read a lot of people's thoughts about the web desktop, and I completely agree with them. The web desktop is a failed attempt to recreate a desktop experience in a browser. That's really what it boils down to. From the start, I've always thought that web desktops were a great idea, but nobody seemed to be doing them a justice. All we have are copies of the existing desktop environment, except much, much worse. We understand this point of view completely, and we want to change that.

Instead of giving you a web-based desktop, we want to give you a desktop for the web. Rather then giving you a carbon-copy of everything that's been done before, we want to actually make the web desktop useful, and bring the good parts of the web into the desktop experience. We also want it to integrate with your existing desktop, and make the two seamless. Lastly, we want to give you total access from your mobile devices, and allow you to run the same applications you would from your desktop on your phone.

The other web desktops don't seem to get this point of view. All they seem to do is copy what's been done before (I'm not aiming at any specific project, just in general). YouOS understood this point of view completely though; they wanted to make the web desktop a completely social environment. In a way we feel that PD is a continuation of where YouOS left off, and we felt really bad that things didn't work out so well for them.

So, we don't want to reproduce what's already been done. If anything, we want to make something that questions the very nature of the existing web desktops. Our 1.0 release will appear like a carbon-copy of the other projects, but don't let this fool you. Starting at 1.1, we have a whole bunch of innovative things that we want to do. Keep in mind that we are a very small team of developers, and we need more help if we ever want to reach this goal. If you agree with us, and want to help us out, please don't hesitate to let us know.