Abandoned?

[funkju]

This app has become a daily driver for me. I use it constantly.

The PRs and Issues are piling up and the last commit was over 6 months ago.

Has @IvanMathy abandoned the project? If so, I believe the developer community that uses this app would be strong enough to keep it moving forward.

[gregops312]

I'm not sure how your issue warrants an issue. This is kind of just noise. I also see that this repo has a nice MIT license so you could do like I did, and just public or privately fork and do what you want.

Food for thought: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open-source-d7cf4568

[IvanMathy]

Hey there,

To answer the question, no it is not abandoned.

Boop is also a daily driver for me, but I don't believe that means it requires constant updates. In fact, I've been using it for three years and never had a single crash, and there are only a handful of features I believe it is missing to feel complete. There are definitely things I'd like to improve, but for 99% of what I do in it, it's good enough. Most issues are just script requests, which by design anybody can create and import in their version of the app. I am not aware of any major bug besides an issue I just saw pop up about somebody not being able to run scripts.

Secondly, this is a side project for me. I unfortunately have very limited free time outside of my day job to work on this, and I tend to do it more when it's a particularly fun feature or I need something new within the app. Triaging PRs and responding to issues is time consuming and not particularly fun overall. That's why I tend to work on a major (fun) feature for each release, and when that feature is complete I go through a whole bunch of PR and issues.

Now, for the past 6 months I have been working on a new flagship feature (namely, multi-cursor editing) so once this is complete I'll go through pending issues and PRs as usual. I know it looks the like the project is stagnant; and that's because I am working in a dependency of Boop, not the main repo (plus, infuriatingly working in a fork does not give you the green dots on your profile so it looks like I've done nothing since January). The feature itself is big and complex and I still have limited time to work on it, but it's moving ahead and I am somewhat close to being done with it.

Finally, allow me to rant for a sec: my personal laptop is getting extremely old and is now out of Apple's update cycle. So not only do I not have a bunch of time to sit down and work on the very complex stuff I'm building right now, but by the time the laptop is up and ready to go I wasted half the time waiting and I'm gonna waste the remaining time getting back up to speed to what I was doing a month prior. I can't justify buying a new computer just to be able to work on an open source project when my current one works well enough for all other purposes and even if I could, I would want to wait until the yearly lineup refresh in September. So unfortunately sometimes soon there's gonna be a point where I'll get locked out of pushing new Boop versions to the App Store, and I'm gonna have to evaluate how much I'm willing to invest in being able to keep this project going. But we're not there yet, and I'll probably have v1.5 ready before then.

I hope this explains enough about my process, what's coming, and the underlying issues with both those things.

Cheers,

Ivan_

[Joshfindit]

I’m new to this repo, but I just want to say that not only do I respect the way it’s written but I wish we had more of Ivan’s mindset across all of open source.

Daily drivers can be bug-free and powerful for decades without updates (or even longer). Instead of measuring projects on the volume of it’s changes I wish there was a trackable metric that said “This tool is solid, reliable, and bug-free”. If we had that I feel like Boop would have come up on my radar way sooner.

Thanks for making a solid and reliable tool.

[funkju]

I mean nothing negative. I just would like to see the project continue to get better. I don't expect @IvanMathy to work for free (or at all if he doesn't want to).

But since a lot of developers use this tool, it seems reasonable that we could contribute and have PRs reviewed and committed... not even by @IvanMathy necessarily.

As @gkman said, Boop is MIT Licensed, so I could (and do) have a fork of it. But wouldn't it be great if we could collaborate on it together?

[jasonf-trustgrid]

I mean nothing negative. I just would like to see the project continue to get better. I don't expect @IvanMathy to work for free (or at all if he doesn't want to).

But since a lot of developers use this tool, it seems reasonable that we could contribute and have PRs reviewed and committed... not even by @IvanMathy necessarily.

As @gkman said, Boop is MIT Licensed, so I could (and do) have a fork of it. But wouldn't it be great if we could collaborate on it together?

Maybe you could start a team that maintains a community built version of the app, and Ivan can be a member and maintainer on that?

[Joeb454]

@IvanMathy, like others, I use this almost every day, but I think @jasonf-trustgrid has a valid point. Is it worth creating a team/community-built version?

Regarding the app store issue, I run a development team that's almost exclusively macOS based; I'd be happy to discuss potentially picking up the app store side of things through our company account and ensuring it remains available for free there. While I totally understand the 'Apple Tax' involved in an open-source project, I wouldn't want to see this become unavailable for people.

To be clear, I'm not trying to drag the project away from you (far from it), but if there's a way I can help keep the project maintained and available for the community, I'll do what I can.