Hello everyone! It’s been a while. So much happened during past summer!
If you remember, after receiving the grant from Shuttleworth Foundation my plan was to temporarily leave the Morevna Project and move to Synfig as a full-time developer. Well, things turned out in a bit different way – instead of going for developer role by myself I have hired a professional C++ developer to work on Synfig. There are lot of things happened to make this decision happen, but the main logic behind this is simple: I believe that the skilled professional coder can do more benefit to Synfig than me.
So, since the August 1st Ivan (that’s the name of our new developer) is coding for Synfig under my direction. I took the role of maintainer and coordinator, which I feel much more comfortable with. It’s still much of work for me here, but as of future perspective that leaves me a room to work out an infrastructure around Synfig, and I put much hopes that Morevna Project could become a part of it.
In any case, my current goal is to accelerate the development of Synfig and make sure it remain sustainable in the future. You can track our progress by reading my weekly reports here (you might remember I did the same way when we produced the Demo). Also, every week we are publishing a development snapshots of Synfig, so you can download them and test the new features by yourself. The snapshots available for all 3 platforms – Linux Windows and OSX, so check them out!
The grant money are enough to fund Ivan’s work till November 1st and now I am looking for a way to pay for his work after that date.
That’s why I have started a small fundraising campaign. It’s really small and just a few days left, but it still not there at the moment. EDIT: We have successfully reached the goal by now and it’s keep moving! Thanks to all supporters! I wonder how much we will be able to move towards our next milestone…
My plan is to run such small campaigns regularly to compensate our expenses on hired developer and thus make sure the development of Synfig continues at the good speed. The donation campaigns are not the only funding sources I’m considering, but they definitely can really help us to gain some time. If our campaigns will be successful, then it will help to bring stability in Synfig development and even expand our resources.
Now I’m back to work!
P.S. BTW, I have some neat fanart artwork pieces to publish, just need some time to arrange them into blogpost it here…
2 Responses
Nice work, August and Konstantin, and thanks for all the effort put in!
Regarding fundraising… did you guys consider Flattr too? And community-based Youtube (monetized) account for Synfig-made videos, for tutorials AND animations?
Hi, Tushant!
Youtube channel idea looks interesting! Of course, it will not give us immediate feedback, but it might be good in the long-term perspective.