Roadmap & Wiki

[lnminente]

Steven, how about defining a roadmap for doing a colective betatesting?

I suggest few weeks for libraries, and few weeks for synchronization. And while doind that between all of us updating a very basic wiki explaining in a few lines how these important functions works. That would reduce confussion, fear of breaking our files, and we would know how to best betatest or do some workarounds.

[Analien]

+1. Excellent idea.

[silasje1]

Already suggested something before. We need a team of people wanting to update or test certain things.

[Blinghound]

+1

I think this is a good idea. Steven always has to rely on users stumbling on issues through normal use, but having small groups of users testing certain features purposefully will speed up this process, and will allow for a more stable Musicbee.

Count me in for testing!

[silasje1]

+1

I think this is a good idea. Steven always has to rely on users stumbling on issues through normal use, but having small groups of users testing certain features purposefully will speed up this process, and will allow for a more stable Musicbee.

Count me in for testing!

+1 For testing or doing some other work

[jistme]

It seems Steven is quite happy and able to cope with all the stuff everybody is throwing at him.
(only geniusses can handle chaos)

One thing I might wish for is being able to know what is relevant/priority to him sometimes.
There are quite some suggestions of which we don't know what he thinks about it, or will follow up on.

Maybe it is achievable to have a webpage with all sugestions, wishes and bugs organised together, and seeing the status?
That would also prevent users asking for the same features repeatively, and making it easer to see what is to be tested for enthousiastic volunteers like the lot of you ;-)
 

[silasje1]

It seems Steven is quite happy and able to cope with all the stuff everybody is throwing at him.
(only geniusses can handle chaos)

One thing I might wish for is being able to know what is relevant/priority to him sometimes.
There are quite some suggestions of which we don't know what he thinks about it, or will follow up on.

Maybe it is achievable to have a webpage with all sugestions, wishes and bugs organised together, and seeing the status?
That would also prevent users asking for the same features repeatively, and making it easer to see what is to be tested for enthousiastic volunteers like the lot of you ;-)
 

Google code has a good system with bugs 

[lnminente]

One thing I might wish for is being able to know what is relevant/priority to him sometimes.
There are quite some suggestions of which we don't know what he thinks about it, or will follow up on.

Me too, that's one of the reasons for this idea. I have many ideas reserved, and i have to be guessing if its monday or not, and if are many bugs or theater view pendant things to not get my idea forgotten

[lnminente]

I like how the rockbox page works. Having the project splitted, and giving to its parts codes for stability, testing, etc

[Steven]

One thing you guys need to understand is I do this as a hobby and having a formal roadmap, whether it be development or testing starts taking this into the territory of being work, having obligations, and not fun! I dont plan to change the development approach for now, so if you think MusicBee should be going onto bigger and better things with a large team of people then its probably best for you to move onto another project that does have those ambitions.

Also I should mention i do contract work for a living and i am about to start an assignment that will probably go on for a year and likely be quite a hard one, so its likely i wont have as much time to look at this except for weekends.
I will keep going with this project but likely at a slower pace. As a side note, i was hoping that more developers would be interested in developing plugins as a way to lessen the burden and bottleneck but it hasnt really taken off in a big way so far.

In terms of the upcoming functionality, there are a huge number of requests that i think are really good, but just wont get done.

In terms of testing, I would be really happy for someone to take the lead with testing and mapping out a testing plan. I appreciate that for that you would like an idea of whats coming next, but right at the moment i dont have a fixed idea of that.
But there is a huge amount of existing functionality that can be tested anyway.
Also keep in mind that solving bugs can be really time consuming and there gets a point where i would rather be doing things that i want to be doing and enjoy, so i will need to make a judgement about whether its worth the time and the number of people likely impacted whether something does get fixed.

So i leave this to you guys how to take this forward

[lnminente]

I understand, and i know many people like this software and want to improve it and its easy to let our minds fly. But we don't need to go so far, just start, and do something, and lets see.
You can say you would like to improve something in particular, and some people interested in that something could come in help, and while that some lines included in a wiki.

Anyway would like to transmit you something, i have experience writing regex codes for a full year for free for Proxomitron, it was a few years ago, and now i see a lot of good ideas are there... let's say better "waiting". Maybe is the time of thinking what could happen to all the good work you have done here when you don't have time and you lose the motivation. How to avoid its lose.

And of course congrats for your contract, i'm pretty sure you won't have problems with job

Edit: And really appreciate your sincerity too

[greenday1987]

Thanks for the updates Steven. Your work is highly appreciated and I'm sure I could never work as hard on a project as you have on MB even if it came with a wage! There is a stable version out of this wonderful program so I'm sure there will be no moaning from any worthwhile user who's opinion is vaguely valued if development comes to a standstill temporarily and you stand back and take a chill-out from it for however long you decide. I only wish I had the skills needed to help out a bit via bug patching or something. Take it easy fella.

[silasje1]

For the testing team i would like to be helping or be the 'leader of the pack' else i would start an wiki page where we can start up making a completly wiki. Here we can start a very nice clear wikipedia page(s). Hope you would agree steven. Otherway i start a unofficial wiki first and then show it to you and see if the quality is high enough. Just 2 things thus ; test team and  official/unofficial wikipage

Thanks for the clear info steven

[Steven]

it would be good to get a wiki up and running but can we start with an unofficial one as "thegreyspot" hasnt been active on the forums for a while and i would need his help to set up an official one

[cartman005]

Silas, I would love to help with a Wiki over the summer. We could use something like wikihost.org.