Back to Three20

[Jeff Verkoeyen]

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since I've written one of my long-winded posts to the newsgroup, so I'll take a bit of time to explain where I've been, what's been going on with Three20, and where Three20 is going in the future.

# Where I've been

The last four months have been rather unproductive for me, as many have noted. The short of it is that I took some unexpected time off from, well, pretty much everything. But my life has stabilized again, and as a direct result I've been ramping up my work on Three20 again.

# What's been going on with Three20

Those who read the newsgroup regularly will undoubtedly have noticed the following thread, titled "This is becoming confusing."

http://groups.google.com/group/three20/browse_thread/thread/15aed566058ba1f5

It addresses a foundational problem with Three20. Earlier this year I was experimenting with a number of alternative community sites. The Google Group has always been an effective tool in organizing the community, but it lacks a number of the newer features that Stack Exchange or even standard forum software provides. However, as a direct result of my leave, there wasn't any clear action taken on making one of these services the new primary service.

There is also the long-standing issue with Three20's documentation: it's slim, at best. A lot of this has to do with the complexity of the framework and the spaghetti-code found within many of the major components. Right before this summer I made a big step toward cleaning up Three20 by tearing it apart into manageable chunks with the modularized version, but it was absolutely only the first step in a long process. The modularized version also has its own shortcomings that need to be discussed.

# Where is Three20 going in the future?

With news of Google Groups shutting down the Pages and Files feature, it's becoming clear that we need a new means of allowing the community to contribute content to Three20.

http://groups-announcements.blogspot.com/2010/09/notice-about-pages-and-files.html?hl=en

This is the goal behind the new Three20.info. Michael Grinich and I have discussed the direction we'd like to see the site go, and Michael had a solid idea that we needed to make it easier for people to contribute content to the site. To solve this problem, a new Three20.info site has been built where all of the content is powered directly by a GitHub repository, found here:

http://github.com/Three20/Articles

Any changes pushed to this repository will go live on the Three20.info site automatically, meaning there will be no bottleneck in creating new articles. Check out the list of articles currently live on the site here:

http://github.com/Three20/Articles/tree/master/_posts/

And their related articles here:

http://new.three20.info/documentation

### Calling for content!

If you have an article that you'd like to see on the new Three20.info site, please feel free to submit a pull request. I'm also going to be contacting various developers who have already written articles and asking them to migrate the content into the new article base.

### What about the other sites?

As of this week, the only sites that will remain active and supported are Three20.info, the Google Group, and Stack Overflow.

## Three20 and Xcode

Since the last major push to Three20, Apple has released a number of new Xcode versions. To address this, I've pushed a complete set of changes to ensure Three20 support for Xcode versions 3.2.2, 3.2.4, and 3.2.5. If you want to hack on Three20 and you're running any of these versions of Xcode as your primary development environment, you can now simply set the target accordingly and go. If you don't care to hack on Three20, then the default libraries all use Xcode 3.2.4 right now, and once 3.2.5 leaves beta, 3.2.5 will be the new default, and so on.

## Issues

The number of issues on GitHub is becoming unmanageable. Add pull requests and issues reported solely in the newsgroup, and the number of active Three20-related requests very quickly rises into the 300s.

To address this, I invite everyone on the Google Group to join me in a bug smashing spree. I'd like to organize this as a formal week-long event within the next few weeks, with digital badges that we can hand out to those who contribute. This will be discussed in more detail in a separate thread.

## The growing Three20 team

Now that I'm back to work on Three20, I will be rekindling the discussions concerning the formation of a larger core development team for Three20. This will lead to a stronger central contributing team for Three20 that will be far more resilient to unexpected disappearances of any one contributor.

## Everything else

There are countless things to discuss after such a long period of silence, but this message already hit the tl;dr point a while back. So in summary, I'm back to working on Three20 regularly each week. I will be putting roughly 10-15 hours/week on the code and website, as well as jumping into newsgroup discussions again.

Looking forward to getting this thing rolling again.

Cheers,
- Jeff

[Prime31]

Jeff lives! Good to hear you survived and enjoyed your endless
summer. I was just about to make Six40 but now that your back I can
put off the project.

[mamcx]

Excelente.

Some ideas for the sprint:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/Sprints


For that, is very important a list of task to be focused...

I don't know how effective is the current issues stuff in github...
maybe setup a public pivotal tracker to focus it?