Nicholas Pike

In my previous post I detailed an update to the Google Calendar Notifier extension for Firefox – this is long over due… and I really wish I had the time to complete it. So here’s the problem: I really don’t have any time to manage and maintain such a project.

I wrote the original versions of the extension during a time in my life where I had lots of free time – and not many other activities to occupy my daily life.

At the moment, I just have too much going on. (Last quarter of college forever in addition to part time job, job searching, graduation preparation, and lots of other stuff)

So what should I do?

I certainly don’t want to abandon the extension – it is still used by many thousands of people. (In various degrees of “working”) . The current source base is pretty horrible, this was my first Firefox extension, so you can tell from my code I did a lot of exploring – and not much refining.

Maybe I will just release the current trunk of my repository (GCN 2.5 for Firefox 2), as well as what I have completed for GCN3 (not much, some core code changes and the base code of a XPCOM component)- maybe some enterprising developer can take the helm and update it.

If your interested, or have any ideas… please feel free to leave a comment to this post.

Fear not… I have not abandoned this project – life has just been incredibly busy, and the extension was at a level of functionality that worked for me.  To top it all off my trac (issue management) database broke with an upgrade of python and I have not been able to fix it.

Last night I setup MantisBG on my staging box, and got it working with my subversion repository that currently holds all my code.  I have begun recovering tasks from trac, and putting them into Mantis – once that is finished I will begin work on the first Milestone for GCN3  (which will be a complete rewrite of the extension, that I started several months ago but never finished).

I expect the following in the first Milestone:

• Firefox 3 support
• Basic features, completely utilizing the GData API
  • Won’t be requiring users to manually import their feed URLs anymore
• The complete rewrite of the Core code will fix many many existing bugs that plague current users (thanks for bearing with me here folks)
• Better localization
• Other then that, no new features for Milestone 1.