Lucid Desktop

It's been a very long time since the last update on the state of 2.0, so I just wanted to keep everyone posted. Work on 1.0 is pretty much dead, and we don't have the time, energy or motivation to fix it. I rather direct all effort toward 2.0 ... [More] , which will be much more practical than 1.0. A lot of the contributors have been busy with outside obligations, myself included, so it's been tough to keep making progress. We're still at the phase where throwing more devs at the problem will only make things take longer though, so this isn't the worst thing in the world. Right now what we're up to is writing the server-side code, and we're making pretty good progress. The code we're using to sandbox apps on the server is finished (for now), and I've started work on writing the scaffolding that everything (Apps/APIs and such) will rest on. At this rate, the scaffolding will be finished some time between the end of November and the end of the year. It won't be anything usable or practical, but it's an important step. Looking a bit further ahead, I'm going to push getting a base set of essential functionality laid down so that we have something people can start using right away. Hopefully at that point we can get contributors to start writing built-in applications for us. It'll take a long time before the cooler ideas behind the project come into existence, but we have to start somewhere. That's about it for now. It's really frustrating having this massive gap between what we envision and what we have, but it'll happen in time. It took us somewhere around 3 years to make 1.0 something impressive, and although I'm hoping it'll take less time, it's still going to be a while until we're really happy with 2.0. [Less]

It's been a very long time since the last update on the state of 2.0, so I just wanted to keep everyone posted. Work on 1.0 is pretty much dead, and we don't have the time, energy or motivation to fix it. I rather direct all effort toward 2.0 ... [More] , which will be much more practical than 1.0. A lot of the contributors have been busy with outside obligations, myself included, so it's been tough to keep making progress. We're still at the phase where throwing more devs at the problem will only make things take longer though, so this isn't the worst thing in the world. Right now what we're up to is writing the server-side code, and we're making pretty good progress. The code we're using to sandbox apps on the server is finished (for now), and I've started work on writing the scaffolding that everything (Apps/APIs and such) will rest on. At this rate, the scaffolding will be finished some time between the end of November and the end of the year. It won't be anything usable or practical, but it's an important step. Looking a bit further ahead, I'm going to push getting a base set of essential functionality laid down so that we have something people can start using right away. Hopefully at that point we can get contributors to start writing built-in applications for us. It'll take a long time before the cooler ideas behind the project come into existence, but we have to start somewhere. That's about it for now. It's really frustrating having this massive gap between what we envision and what we have, but it'll happen in time. It took us somewhere around 3 years to make 1.0 something impressive, and although I'm hoping it'll take less time, it's still going to be a while until we're really happy with 2.0. [Less]

Just to keep everyone updated about what's going on, we took the first steps and finished the URL router for 2.0 in it's most basic form today. Nothing ridiculously exciting, but it's still pretty cool. As you can guess from the screenshot ... [More] above, we're going to make sure everything in 2.0 has test cases that can be run. For the technically inept, this means that we'll have code that checks our code for us to make sure things are still working the way they're supposed to. In the long run this will help us write better code and things will be less buggy. Since Jay is concerned that I'm going to be stuck perfecting just this component until next year, I'm going to move on to another module now (not sure what just yet). My goal for the next month (or less?) is to get the groundwork done so that we can get people from the core team working, thus increasing productivity. As for 1.0 fixes, we're now aware of what's causing the apparent problem (no thanks to PHP), so hopefully that gets fixed soon. [Less]

Just to keep everyone updated about what's going on, we took the first steps and finished the URL router for 2.0 in it's most basic form today. Nothing ridiculously exciting, but it's still pretty cool. As you can guess from the screenshot above ... [More] , we're going to make sure everything in 2.0 has test cases that can be run. For the technically inept, this means that we'll have code that checks our code for us to make sure things are still working the way they're supposed to. In the long run this will help us write better code and things will be less buggy. Since Jay is concerned that I'm going to be stuck perfecting just this component until next year, I'm going to move on to another module now (not sure what just yet). My goal for the next month (or less?) is to get the groundwork done so that we can get people from the core team working, thus increasing productivity. As for 1.0 fixes, we're now aware of what's causing the apparent problem (no thanks to PHP), so hopefully that gets fixed soon. [Less]

Recently we moved to a new server, so there were some hiccups getting things transferred. The download paths were changed in the configs, but not in the database, and I forgot to update them when the servers moved. On the plus side, our code ... [More] site is actually going to be up now, which is nice. In other news, work on 2.0 is going well, although with a few hiccups, since we're still figuring out the environment we're writing code in. The good news is we have a solid grasp on what Lucid 2 applications will look like, and some of the helper libraries we may be using. In 1.0 land, a lot of our users were reporting troubles with the uploader. We'll get that fixed as soon as we can, but the team members are pretty swamped at the moment, so it may take a while to get a fix out. We're pretty sure it has to do with the flash uploader being temperamental, so we'll probably just use a standard HTML-based uploader. [Less]

Recently we moved to a new server, so there were some hiccups getting things transferred. The download paths were changed in the configs, but not in the database, and I forgot to update them when the servers moved. On the plus side, our code site ... [More] is actually going to be up now, which is nice. In other news, work on 2.0 is going well, although with a few hiccups, since we're still figuring out the environment we're writing code in. The good news is we have a solid grasp on what Lucid 2 applications will look like, and some of the helper libraries we may be using. In 1.0 land, a lot of our users were reporting troubles with the uploader. We'll get that fixed as soon as we can, but the team members are pretty swamped at the moment, so it may take a while to get a fix out. We're pretty sure it has to do with the flash uploader being temperamental, so we'll probably just use a standard HTML-based uploader. [Less]

Note: this isn't an April-fools day joke A lot of people have been asking me if the project is dead, or if we're working on 2.0. No, the project is not dead. We've been supporting 1.x, it's just that we haven't found any major bugs that ... [More] require us to release a new version. We don't really want to add too much new functionality to 1.0 when it's going to be outdated by 2.0. That said, work on 2.0 is starting to pick up now. The UI design has been finalized, the code for said UI is being worked on, and design of the core is progressing well. Once we figure out the core, we'll begin to show off the UI we're planning on using. A while back we announced that we would be using Python for the server code. Since then we changed our minds and decided to use Node.js. Node.js' asynchronous design seemed like a better choice in our book. On top of that, we liked the idea of writing Lucid purely in Javascript. There are plenty of other reasons, but altogether Node seemed like a better fit for Lucid. We put a lot of thought into the UI design in 2.0, and even more thought into the yet-to-be-finished core design, so we're hoping you all like it when we reveal it. As always, we're looking for people to help out, whether you're experienced with dojo/node.js or not. Let us know if you're interested in helping us. [Less]

Note: this isn't an April-fools day joke A lot of people have been asking me if the project is dead, or if we're working on 2.0. No, the project is not dead. We've been supporting 1.x, it's just that we haven't found any major bugs ... [More] that require us to release a new version. We don't really want to add too much new functionality to 1.0 when it's going to be outdated by 2.0. That said, work on 2.0 is starting to pick up now. The UI design has been finalized, the code for said UI is being worked on, and design of the core is progressing well. Once we figure out the core, we'll begin to show off the UI we're planning on using. A while back we announced that we would be using Python for the server code. Since then we changed our minds and decided to use Node.js. Node.js' asynchronous design seemed like a better choice in our book. On top of that, we liked the idea of writing Lucid purely in Javascript. There are plenty of other reasons, but altogether Node seemed like a better fit for Lucid. We put a lot of thought into the UI design in 2.0, and even more thought into the yet-to-be-finished core design, so we're hoping you all like it when we reveal it. As always, we're looking for people to help out, whether you're experienced with dojo/node.js or not. Let us know if you're interested in helping us. [Less]

Hello everyone, we've decided to announce today the Lucid Desktop app for Lucid! Now, you can run Lucid Desktop right from Lucid, without having to open a new browser tab or window! You can even run multiple instances of the Lucid app ... [More] inside of Lucid! Now you can separate apps by task! For example, you can play games while filling out that important spreadsheet for work! And if that wasn't enough, you can go even further and run the Lucid app inside of the Lucid app! You can even run the Lucid app in that last Lucid app! And so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless! We are proud to be the first web desktop that offers this technology. We hope it's adopted by other web desktops too! Download: LucidApp.lucid.zip [Less]

Hello everyone, we've decided to announce today the Lucid Desktop app for Lucid! Now, you can run Lucid Desktop right from Lucid, without having to open a new browser tab or window! You can even run multiple instances of the Lucid app inside of ... [More] Lucid! Now you can separate apps by task! For example, you can play games while filling out that important spreadsheet for work! And if that wasn't enough, you can go even further and run the Lucid app inside of the Lucid app! You can even run the Lucid app in that last Lucid app! And so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless! We are proud to be the first web desktop that offers this technology. We hope it's adopted by other web desktops too! Download: LucidApp.lucid.zip [Less]