Independent Projects' Status Reports- MozillaZine

Independent Projects' Status Reports

by TONY JORDAN |

Beonex - Ben Bucksch

Achievements:

Beonex Communicator has been surprisingly well recieved here in the German area. So far, we had 35.000 complete downloads, not counting mirrors. Many users could be described as excited ("Now, that's a browser!"). I even got positive feedback from the Google team.
Beonex has been covered on several news sites (German: heise Newsticker, ZDnet Germany, PC Go, GIGA; International: Tucows (rating: 5 of 5 cows), Freshmeat) and German print magazines (iX, PC Professionell).
Code changes (those with general applicability) for Beonex Comm. 0.6 have been submitted to mozilla.org, waiting for review/approval.

Tasklist:

Creating a standardized way for users to donate to Beonex, either in general or for a certain feature. The money from private users will be used in a non-profit way.
Press section on website
A new release based on Mozilla 0.8 and/or Mozilla 0.9, depending on the quality.
Evaluating smaller platforms like BeOS, OS/2 and *BSD.

Problems:

We still have no Mac release [:-(] . Any volunteers?
Almost no press coverage internationally. Beonex has hardly been noticed outside the German area, apart from Usenet.
Participation from the community, e.g. users helping other users or users writing documentation, is much less than I thought. If there is anything holding *you* back (too commercial touch?), please tell me - maybe I can fix it. BTW: I don't intend to make profit with private users.

MozDev - David Bosewell

MozDev hosted the New York Developers meeting last week, David Bosewell has posted notes and pictures at the following URLs.

http://meetzilla.mozdev.org/ny_notes.html
http://meetzilla.mozdev.org/pictures/ny_gallery/

Games.Mozdev.org - David McNamara

http://games.mozdev.org has just been given a major overhaul. The new layout categorises each game by genre and provides information and links for each. It also simplifies the installation procedure with a standard install link for every game. The new design behind the site is aimed both for newcomers to the Mozilla gaming community to sample the existing games easily, and also to find contact information should they want to get involved. The website provides a central repository for games, so new developers can join existing projects or start new ones, satisfied that they do not already exist. Of course, the source code for the games is freely available, so it is easy to look at a wide variety of games and see how they are made. This is particularily relevant for those working on Jukebox, the common game framework libraries. We can also host your new games. The new website front-end will hopefully encourage more people to get involved with writing games for Mozilla, and with the experience of others so easily accessable, to further the Mozilla gaming cause and Mozilla as a whole.

ForumZilla - Myk Melez

It has been a while since we released a status report so here is a list of some highlights since we released a few months ago.

Achievements:

Support for RSS 1.0!
New skin.
Bolding of unread stories and articles.
ForumZilla support from LiveJournal.

Tasks:

We are working on support for Scoop, the software that runs Kuro5hin and several other discussion forums.
Code cleanup and re-organization is being done to prepare for public CVS on mozdev.org.
Planning and prioritizing new features.

We would really like to be able to read many more forums in ForumZilla, but support has been slow. If you run a threaded discussion service and would like to support ForumZilla, please contact us.