Heartbeat pre-alpha release

[aral]

Hey everyone,

After about a year of work, we‘re finally at the point where we can get started.

Heartbeat is now officially pre-alpha!

I just sent invitations out to our top crowdfunding supporters for the private pre-alpha (‘M-tier’, the wonderful folks who gave us $1,000) and, if everything stays up on our Waystone instance, I plan to slowly send invitations out to the C-tier starting tomorrow (see what I did there?… umm… ok, I won’t leave my day job).

By the way, people have already started joining and I’ve already fixed a bug with accents in names not being announced properly at sign up thanks to Stéphane.

The source

I’ve just made the various pre-alpha source code repositories public:

• Heartbeat Cocoa
• Heartbeat Node
• pulse-node
• Waystone
• pre-alpha — the code for the personalised private pre-alpha pages with invitation codes. Along with h2c2 (MIT license), and Sendy, you could repurpose that to run your own invitation-only alpha/beta.

Of the above, Heartbeat Cocoa, Heartbeat Node, and pulse-node don’t have open source licenses yet. We’re working on it. We need a license that is free as in freedom and yet allows us to put Heartbeat on the App Store. Expect more thoughts on that this week — I’m talking to Richard Stallman on this and he urged me not to jump the gun. I just heard that Eben Moglen is happy to offer us some legal advice on this so I’ll be in touch with him this week and, of course, I’ll update you on how we go.

Waystone is licensed under AGPLv3.

Some of the components, libraries in Heartbeat are licensed separately under the MIT license and you might find them independently useful:

• Set (unobtrusive template engine for Node.js and browser)
• Handle
• Delay
• VoiceOver Status Detection

(Explore source.ind.ie to see all our public repositories.)

So even if you’re not on the private pre-alpha (on our hosted version of Waystone), please feel free to clone the Heartbeat repositories and build the pre-alpha yourself and test it with your own local Waystone installation.

I’ll be updating these forums with further documentation and instructions in the coming days. Good places to start learning about the system are:

Design and overview

• Conceptual design
• Technical design
• Core sequence diagrams

Limitations

• Heartbeat Known Issues
• Waystone and Pulse Limitations

Other details

• Heartbeat screens (incomplete/work-in-progress)
• Waystone REST API

To everyone who has supported so far, thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you. I hope you enjoy being part of the Heartbeat pre-alpha. It’s been quite a ride and we’re only just getting started.

Here’s to the journey!…

[AustinPrior]

Aaargh! I'm a C-tier. I thought we were getting it today as well.

OK. Another day or two. You can do it, Austin. You can do it.

(see what I did there?… umm… ok, I won’t leave my day job)

I've been re-reading this post and wracking my brains. I cannot find the wordplay or pun. I love a good pun (I'm even partial to the occasional bad one )

[aral]

Sorry, @AustinPrior I didn’t want Waystone to explode. Tomorrow morning I'll at least be fresh and ready to deal with it if it does

Thank you for being awesome; can’t wait to get you on Heartbeat (as early and clunky as it is at the moment.)

[bob]

IT'S ALIVE! Great work, everyone

Ind.ie Heartbeat for OSX - pre-alpha release

[laura]

Thank you so much, Bob. What a lovely piece to wake up to

[adamprocter]

Excitedly waiting on the C-Tier...

[alchemy]

IT'S ALIVE! Great work, everyone

Great article Bob. I will really benefit from the video!!!

Congrats to the team.

[ChristianeG]

Wonderful news! Can't wait to start using it. And it looks cool, thanks to all of you, who have made this happen!

[aral]

Just a quick update, folks, I’m working on fixing the refresh hack on the Everyone timeline before we let more of you on the pre-alpha as it will become unusable otherwise. I should have that done tonight. It’s also making me use Set in production for the first time so I’m documenting some workarounds and thinking of paving some of the cowpaths I’m encountering.

[Andreas]

Great! Thanks for creating this.

[Andreas]

Great work Aral. I'm pretty excited, I was already excited in December, so you can imagine how excited I am now. It's really incredible what your small team is doing. Thumbs up!

[aral]

Great work Aral.

Thank you so much, Andreas, it’s very early days yet. But it’s a start. And it’s very exciting to see other people using something that for a long time existed only on my notebook

I was already excited in December, so you can imagine how excited I am now.

Tell me about it — you do this stuff for over 30 years and how do you underestimate by over six months. I guess you just do. But the important thing is that we kept on and that we will keep on because, to be frank, this is what we’re doing now and I have no other plans for this lifetime.

It's really incredible what your small team is doing. Thumbs up!

Thank you so much! With some of the negativity that comes with doing what we’re doing (and not apologising for any of it), it’s really heartening to read such positive feedback. It means a lot!

[AustinPrior]

Thank you so much! With some of the negativity that comes with doing what we’re doing (and not apologising for any of it)...

As we say in Ireland "Feck the begrudgers"

[romdisc]

I'm not a Mac user.

When will Hearbeat be available for other platforms?

For instance linux.

[aral]

Hey @romdisc, the source for Heartbeat is available so if you or anyone else wants to port it to other platforms, we would be very grateful.

Unfortunately, given that we’re a tiny social enterprise of three folks and given that I am the only developer on Heartbeat at the moment, I simply do not have the capacity to consider doing this myself. My focus is to improve Heartbeat on one platform and make it useful. If we succeed at that, I am sure that others will port it to other platforms.