Roadmap

Update: Since we decided to squeeze in our PubSub support early and due to the large number of improvements that the next version of Gush will bring, the release version has been updated from 1.2 to 2.0

Lots of people have been asking what we have slated for the next release, or when will their favorite IM/Newsreader feature will be included. Typically, our answers range from "you mean we need another release?" to "that feature will be included over my dead body."

We've put together a list of things we think are necessary to take Gush to the next level. Our goal is to get 2.0 out in about 6 to 8 weeks.

Here are the "big ticket" items we have planned for 2.0:

File Transfer: Straight-forward file transfer as outlined in , , , and . There is some talk floating around about extending JEP-65 to use TLS which is something we'd certainly like to support.

Multi-user chat: As outlined in . Our implementation will be fairly standard, but there are some UI concepts that we're going to play with to make things easier on the non-IRC geeks out there.

Nested Buddy List Groups: Pretty self explanatory. It shouldn't be too difficult, and it would help make Announcements more flexible.

Internationalization: Amazingly, English isn't the only language used in the world. Several people have offered to help translate Gush, which is really appreciated. Factoring out all the displayable text will take sometime. There's already partial support for use of xml:lang in Gush, but we'll have to make the transition complete.

Conversation Gems: Gush already has excellent support for managing conversation history. The next step is to automatically pull out phone numbers, email addresses, links, and so forth from archived conversations. This is probably 95% of why people revisit conversations, and it would be good if we can save people from scrolling around looking for these tidbits.

Presence messages: Support the one liner type messages that are common in most Jabber clients. The idea is to show contact's message as a bi-line in the Buddy List below the contact's username similar to how MSN currently shows status messages.

Revamp Login screen: People new to the Jabber world are easily deterred when the login procedure fails because of corporate firewalls. The login screen will be altered to guide people through the process of registering their accounts, and make suggestions in terms of proxy settings if a connection fails and so forth.

News feed synchronization: Synchronize news feeds between multi-machines. If you're logging in with the same account from home and at work, then all your news feeds will be synchronized.

Embed Mozilla instead of Safari on OS X: Gush on OS X is slightly worse off than the Windows or Linux versions because of our reliance of WebKit. WebKit is OK, but it has some quirks while hosting a Flash SWF file. As soon as we get some expert help to compile CHBrowser (Cocoa Component), we'd like to move away from WebKit to Mozilla for hosting the Flash portion of Gush.

Post 2.0 features:

• Searching / Indexing conversations and news entries.
• End-to-End Encryption
• File Sharing
• Announcement improvements
• 3rd party APIs
• Video chat

There are features not listed here because they haven't been thought up, or they're top secret. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, then we'd certainly like to hear about it. You can email/IM us directly, or you can drop by the newsgroup and discuss it there.

Posted by Dudley at July 30, 2004 04:38 PM