Yes, I broke my own promises on delivering the release.
Yes, there is very little development activity.

I don’t want to say that the project is dead even if this is how it looks like to the outside world. Ideas are there, even the code is partly there (I still use Straw as my primary and only news reader – it’s been over a year and a half now I think).

Unfortunately, the time to develop is not there…

See the current vision of the project:

http://live.gnome.org/Straw/NewVision

The Discussion Tracker (sort of a “semantic news reader”) direction is a great and exciting one from development point of view. And I am sure that it would provide very unique features to the users.

It all hits the wall when confronted with the real life – be it jobs, families, universities etc.

At this point I won’t promise anything. The project is not dead, let’s call it a transition period. It’s not just word play – I really want to find the time to develop, it’s just not that easy these days…

Please see comments in the following post to get a feeling of what is the current situation like.

http://strawreader.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/news-from-the-development-front-line

This time, instead of promising, we will deliver. (see what I did there?)

General

Currently we are working towards first official “testing” release. It’ll be released when we’re confident enough about the quality – this includes not only the technical quality, but also usability and user experience. We want to be ready in February. However, there are many changes in almost every part of Straw, so the effort put into development and testing is considerable.

Our main target at this point is to have a solid foundation that we can build on in the future. We believe that the foundation of a software project must be carefully developed to provide enough flexibility to handle new functionality and user requests once the project milestone is released.

The “future” branch

All development is currently happening on the “future” branch in our Git repository. If you want to see how things are going, you can use a snapshot link next to the latest commit to get the latest source tree snapshot.

Note that at this point it is not recommended to install snapshots, but rather run Straw from the source tree. It’s quite simple:

First, unpack the snapshot tarball to some directory, and run the following command from that directory:

scripts/straw-local

Please note that things change quite often on “future” branch, it’s probably not a good idea to use it as your primary news reader at this point (although I must admit I already do . Also, not every part of the UI works as it should and there is always some amount of bugs – that’s normal in development, but be prepared.

Feedback

We’ve already started cleaning up our GNOME Live wiki, Bugzilla and we have several ideas on how to improve our website – all that in preparation for 0.28 release!

Stay tuned for next updates.

Currently all the development is focused on getting that branch stable enough for official testing releases – we’ll be announcing those soon.

You can find future branch here:

http://repo.or.cz/w/straw.git?a=shortlog;h=future

If you’re brave enough to test the development version at this time, you can use snapshot links next to each commit or clone it directly using Git:

git clone -n git://repo.or.cz/straw.git straw-future
cd straw-future && git pull origin future

Again – a lot is changing currently in that branch so be warned

If you want to discuss your ideas, suggestions or anything really with us, join #straw IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

New version of Straw is underway, we’re working hard on new features and overall improvements. You can learn more about current status and plans at the wiki.

I made a small screencast of some of new features that are actually working In the video you can see:

• new tree view-based feed list
• feed item aggregation – if you click on a category, all items from child feeds are shown
• feed discovery dialog – you can type only website address and Straw will try to discover any news sources on that page

Many things are still not finished, like downloading (and showing) feed icons (favicons), “search folders”, improved UI dialogs (applying Gnome Human Interface Guidelines).

Stay tuned, and, of course, feedback is very appreciated!

Screencast (MPEG, ~4MB): link

A lot of our ideas and relevant development discussions will be posted here. Two other guys, Pawel Paprota and Kalle Persson, will also be contributing to this blog.

If you feel you need to contact us, just email us in our mailing list or log in IRC, #straw channel in irc.freenode.net.