App updates and more
By Kenton Varda - 09 Oct 2014
It’s been a while since our last post, but we’ve been doing a ton of stuff. It’s been a mad scramble here at Sandstorm HQ to get things organized after our successful crowdfunding campaign. Let me fill you in on some of the things we’ve been doing!
App Updates
The Sandstorm app list now stands at 20 apps. While we will continue adding more, it’s also important to keep the ones we have up to date. To that end, today we’ve pushed updates to several apps which have seen upstream changes since our original releases:
- Ghost
- Wave
- Mediagoblin
- Tiny Tiny RSS
- EtherCalc
We have more updates coming soon, including Mailpile, Groovebasin, and ShareLaTeX.
We are also excited to say that our EtherCalc port will henceforth be directly maintained by the upstream maintainer, Audrey Tang.
We don’t have automatic “push” updates yet (they’re coming), so to update your copy of a Sandstorm app, you must go to the app list and install it again. Sandstorm will recognize that you’re installing an update and will upgrade your existing files.
Meeting Notes
Curious to see what’s going on with Sandstorm on a day-to-day basis? We have started posting our daily meeting notes to the Sandstorm dev list. Feel free to subscribe for updates. (And yes, we do hope to move the mailing list to a Sandstorm app as soon as we have one. ;) )
App Committee
The App Committee will begin voting on new Sandstorm Apps soon. You can follow the action on the App Committee group (but only committee members can post there).
APIs
Sandstorm recently gained the ability to host apps which expose APIs. This means that it’s now possible to do things like have a mobile client app which talks to your Sandstorm server. We will soon be updating some of our existing apps to take advantage of this feature, at which point we’ll do a larger announcement. Check out the sandstorm-dev post for details.
Perk fulfillment
Credits: Everyone who contributed and who responded to our questionnaire is now named in the Sandstorm about page and on our home page. If you contributed but missed the questionnaire we sent out, please e-mail us to let us know how you want your name to appear.
Stickers and t-shirts: We’ve collected everyone’s shipping addresses and t-shirt sizes and will be shipping these out soon. It took a little longer than expected to get everyone to respond, but we’ve now passed the info off to the fulfillment company and expect these to ship within the next five weeks or so.
Last day to contribute to Sandstorm
By Kenton Varda - 31 Aug 2014
There’s just a few hours left in our campaign, which wraps up at midnight tonight (Pacific time). This is your last chance to grab some stickers, a t-shirt, hosting, or a LAN party invite. Starting tomorrow we’ll be heads-down coding, so you won’t be hearing from us quite so often. ;)
We’d like to take a moment to thank our Key Individual and Corporate Sponsors who together contributed $16,384:
Thank you all for your support!
– Kenton, Jade, Jason, David, and Garply
PS. If you want to help us a little more by clicking some things:
- Star Sandstorm on Github
- Follow @SandstormIO on Twitter
- Follow Sandstorm.io on Google+
- Like Sandstorm.io on Facebook
- Subscribe to the Sandstorm blog using your favorite RSS feed reader
We did it! And one more app...
By Kenton Varda - 28 Aug 2014
Thanks to you, we’ve reached our funding goal with four days to spare. We are honored to have been pushed past the goal by renowned Free Software developer Audrey Tang, who among many other things is one of the core developers of EtherCalc, an app which has been ported to Sandstorm. Audrey becomes our second Key Individual Sponsor. We were also helped immensely by our second Corporate Sponsor, HumanWeb Networks. (A third Corporate Sponsor came in this morning; details coming soon.)
We are still accepting contributions! Now through Sunday is your last chance to pick up one of our campaign perks and get yourself listed in our credits. Go grab a t-shirt and a sticker pack (featuring the Sand Cat), preorder Sandstorm hosting, or grab one of the four remaining LAN Party Invites, or become one of our key sponsors. Go to the campaign »
One More App: MediaWiki
We’ve just released our last app port of the campaign: MediaWiki. This is the very software that powers Wikipedia, packaged as a Sandstorm app. You can use MediaWiki on Sandstorm to host a private wiki for you and your friends or teammates. Go install it from the app list now, either on your own Sandstorm server or on our demo.
Meet the Sand Cat
By Kenton Varda - 27 Aug 2014
Allow me to introduce Sandstorm’s new mascot, the Sand Cat. Based on the adorable desert animal who can go for weeks without drinking by using only the water from its prey, the Sand Cat is the handiwork of talented illustrator Néna Nguyen.
The Sand Cat’s story will begin to unfold over the coming weeks, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek so that we could let you know that we’ll be adding Sand Cat stickers to every sticker pack sold as part of our Indiegogo campaign. So, if you haven’t had a chance yet, grab a sticker pack for $8 or a t-shirt plus sticker pack for $32.
Streaming Music with Groove Basin
By David Renshaw - 26 Aug 2014
Today we are releasing our port of Groove Basin, the ongoing product of Andrew Kelley’s three year quest to build the ultimate music player.
With the Groove Basin app, you can upload music to a Sandstorm grain and listen to it from anywhere. Groove Basin provides loudness compensation, gapless playback, and support for a wide range of codecs, including all of the common ones like mp3, flac, ogg, m4a, aif, wav, and wma.
As befits a Sandstorm app, Groove Basin also has some interesting sharing features. You can connect one client to speakers and let other clients act as remote controls, with the ability to control playback and upload new music. Alternatively, you can set up a long distance listening party, where geographically dispersed listeners share a playback stream. We’ve integrated Groove Basin’s permissions system with Sandstorm’s, so only the instance owner is allowed to perform destructive actions like deleting tracks or editing tags.
I highly recommend that you give it a spin, either on your personal Sandstorm server or on the demo.