Kaya.gs Alpha 0.4, and the Tweaki

3 work-days left until Alpha 0.4.

Today Pato did some major cleaning of the front-end. In a software project its important to clean-up after the mess, or it piles up. It piles up dangerously. And it gets harder and harder to work on afterwards. So regularly we spend some time improving the systems internals, even though users won't see a change directly.
But we are here for the long haul, and we want to build something flexible and adaptative, so the quality of what we make is important for long term maintenance.

I was however busy with another great feature: including playing bots like gnugo on the server. Honestly i thought it was going to be harder than it was. It was running in less than 6 hoours work. It calculates score, resigns,plays quite fast. I still have to polish it a bit more, to make sure its more sturdy, but i feel confident it will be included for the next version.
This came hand in hand with finally fixing the replay bot, which was failing sporadically after showing a couple of games.

There are many more things coming but i will leave the suspense alive. What we finally caved in to was doing a change log. So we will see how comfortable it is for us to actually use it :). So now you can expect to read the new features and functionalities right after the friday's update.


One thing that's was positively noticeable of coming out with the alpha was the avalanche of feedback users have been giving us. From ideas to bugs, we have received 100's of messages and reports.

Because our development efforts are full-steam ahead, organizing this input of ideas is an important priority so we can increase the time we use to solve and implement them. Hence i added a new space for suggestions for users and its the Tweaki: http://senseis.xmp.net/?KayaGsTweaki

Ideas on how to solve new situations or what would be great to innovate on go mostly to the well known uservoice feedback-tab. This is important as ideas get votes, and prioritized. Several ideas there have already been developed, some of them completely new ones and innovative.

Bug-reports or specific technical problems can be reported in the ticket system from inside the server, which users have found already. Once we fix them, reporters would get automatic notification of our response.

But i noticed many things were said that didn't really fit into the above categories, and they were said on the chat. Small things, tweaks or small annoyances. Thats what the Tweaki is about :).