This release also makes it one thing obvious to me: while in development, Fnk will always target the latest version of Flash that’s publicly available, without worrying about user penetration or anything of the sort. Old versions of Fnk will still be available as always, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Also, Fnk development is close to resuming, now that I finally have a computer at home with everything installed. I can’t wait to play with those features. As a personal playground of Flash capabilities and the code that’s used for them, not being bound to artificial limitations like that is quite liberating.

Maybe this is not so obvious in this website, but one of the most important aspects in my defense of the Fnk project during my final college presentation was how we’re moving to web-based applications to many of the common tasks we’d only usually find in expensive standalone programs, so it’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one who think there’s a silent revolution forming up. That’s not to say I believe we’ll completely replace standalone applications with web-based ones, but I can see a large number of web apps taking over.

Ironically, to me, this is a full change of mind from how I saw things around 4 years ago; I used to laugh at the idea of someone editing text documents online, but my own college experience has made me open my eyes. That’s because during college, I normally needed to do some tasks like edit documents or spreadsheets from different computers – from different operating systems – just about all the damn time, and almost never using the same computer. Remoting to my home computer (through VNC) was a problem due to firewalls and lack of speed; portable, thumb drive-based applications were too slow (and I needed both OSX and Windows versions of those). But when I started using applications like Google Docs, things just snapped into place. It just clicked, and I started using Google Docs every day for college-related stuff.

I certainly don’t think this is a solution for everyone, but for some, web applications is just perfect, and this is also something I hope to defend with Fnk.

The reason for that decision were twofold. First, I had to decide what kind of license to attach to it – either a more permissive open-source license (like MIT) or a more orthodox license (like GPL). While I had not made any kind of decision on that matter, I’m leaning towards GPL, with maybe LGPL for library versions of the Fnk player – this would be the first project I release under those licenses, and the decision is not that easy.

The second reason, and probably most important one, is that I’m simply not a very good open source author. It’s not that I’m completely ignorant of what it is or how it works – I have created open source two projects (MC Tween and Tweener) that have been quite successful, and I had no problem in releasing some other stuff I created as open source code.

The problem, instead, is that I don’t know how to actually run an open source project with more than one people; it’s fairly easy for me to release and update my own stuff, but when it becomes bigger, and people start making requests, or contributing code, or sending suggestions or bugfixes, I’m just out of my league and I don’t know how to deal with the centralization of control and how to manage people under those circumstances. To put it another way, I’m just a bad open source project leader. Even my knowledge of the available tools (CVS/SVN, issue/goal tracking) at administrative level is pretty rudimentary and tend to be restricted to what contributors know.

While I’m not holding my breath over anything, there’s a chance that more people will want to contribute to Fnk, either with bug reporting and suggesting, or with new code for bug fixing or new features. Under that scenario, my fears are that I would not know how to properly deal with them – specially with how to make the project gears spin well enough for the project to work with more than one author contributing to it with no delays. The project has never been about making Fnk’s code public (although it does have its problems currently), but what to do with feedback I could from it.

Because of this, I’ve been researching a bit and reading about how to properly run open source projects before I can make Fnk’s source public. Specially, I have been reading Karl Fogel‘s freely available book, “Producing Open Source Software“, found thanks to this page. And I have to say, it’s been pretty enlightening. Not only does the guy write pretty well, but the book talks about all aspects of free and open source software, including providing historic and contextual information about what’s discussed.

This is what this post is about. If you’re unsure about what open source software is about, or about how you can make a successful open source project, go check the book out. It is rather long, but you can skip some parts you already know and go straight to the topics you are curious about. I’m mostly focused on the technical management issues, and it’s been pretty good so far.

Standalone version changes:

• Added: menu item mnemonics (ALT+letter shortcuts for Windows and Linux)
• Added: all keys are properly detected by the “Keyboard (System)” node in fullscreen mode

Node changes:

• Added: ToString (Number), does a simple number -> string conversion

Other changes and notes:

• Fixed an error where certain features would be locked because the menu would think “F” was a special key shortcut. To fix it, certain shortcuts (function keys, DEL, TAB) will have to be disabled for a while.

This update marks the beginning of work on the standalone version optimization feature group. For more information, see the current development roadmap.

Features added:

• The standalone version now uses the native operating system’s menu (pending tests under OS X however)

Nodes changed:

• SineSynth (Sound): frequency input is now correct
• TriangleSynth (Sound): frequency input is now correct
• SquareSynth (Sound): frequency input is now correct
• SawtoothSynth (Sound): frequency input is now correct

• Misc editing: link types, panel additions, proper connection editing and value validation
• Standalone version optimization and features (native OS UI, proper local file reading)
• Misc graphic features
• Misc sound features
• Misc video features
• Embed player
• Web capabilities (server-side saving/loading/sharing)
• Sub-patch creating and editing
• Loadable SWF/SWC player
• Proper stream support (remote loading)
• File embedding
• XML features
• Multi-user editing

It’s a lot of stuff to be done (and this doesn’t count more basic changes, like fixing bugs and adding more basic nodes). So instead of doing random different changes, I’ve decided to tackle each specific group at a time.

Right now, while this wouldn’t usually be the #1 priority, I’m fixing the standalone version features – making sure it’s properly integrate to the user’s operating system and working as expected, like using the native OS menu, opening .fnk files, reading image and sound files without a lot of internal circlejerking, and things like that. I believe this is needed to have a more mature application to work with before dealing with some of the inner features.

Other change groups will follow – there’s still a lot in Fnk that can be considered quite flaky. When the time comes, I’ll post here about it.

While Fnk doesn’t yet support PB filters – right now its image filtering capabilities are restricted to the lone Blur filter node – it’ll do so in the near future (it has always been part of the plan since Fnk was born), and this is a great opportunity to learn the platform. HLSL/GLSL pixel shader programmers will already feel right at home, and will also be contributing to something that can be used by a majority of people later (in After Effects, Photoshop and many others), not just by programmers in some OpenGL or DirectX environment.

This version basically changes the way how sound synthesis is handled internally, and add some new waveforms. It’s not entirely right yet, but a lot better than before.

Nodes added:

• Sawtooth (Sound): generates a sawtooth waveform for sound synthesis, with configurable harmonics
• Square (Sound): generates a square waveform for sound synthesis, with configurable harmonics
• Triangle (Sound): generates a triangle waveform for sound synthesis, with configurable harmonics
• Sine (Sound): generates a sinusoidal waveform for sound synthesis (previously known as “WaveGenerator (Sound)”)

Nodes removed:

• WaveGenerator (Sound): dies and reincarnates as “Sine (Sound)”, with changed parameters and functionality