Yes, I am alive. Gentoo is rocking the desktop and "msgpad":http://msgpad.com is slowly but surely getting there.
As theoretically straight forward as pushing out a novel Internet service may seem, it snot. The thing slowing me down right now is that I'm at the edge. The edge is a place that's unfamiliar. This means I have to think everything through rather than blindly follow industry norms.
For example, you know those millions of chat places out there where you have to signup first? msgpad doesn't require this. In fact, signing up in msgpad is a single click process - from your email inbox!
"Hey there, you've been invited to chat. You're a new user so here's a password. Would you like to join?; Read our Terms of Service here - Yes/No"
This is vitally important, and it's small things like this that take a lot of "thought" time which from the outside looks like "nothing getting done" time. You have to stop yourself from thinking that too sometimes.
Here are some other challenges I set myself:
* Cross platform - Check! Thank you web standards and open source libraries. Couldn't have done it without you.
* Compatible with "older" browsers - Check! Opera only recently started handling text/javascript returns correctly so I ditched RJS. My architecture is cleaner without it anyway.
* PDA/Smart Phone Enabled - Check! Working with Opera Mobile. Will work with other mobile browsers too, I haven't looked in to that yet.
* Normal mobile enabled - Check! text/javascript return types are not handled by Opera Mini so I interperet Javascript on the client side through eval. This is a nicer model in my opinion because the thing asking for the information is the one doing something with it. I'm still not sure I like RJS for this reason.
* Console browser enabled - Check! Believe it or not it's working in Links console ;) I'm not sure why I wanted this but I did. You just have to plan carefully. Or in my case, plan carefully three times. If you manage to push out a console version that means you are coding to web standards and you aren't locking out screen readers etc.
This functionality is provided by a single code path. Many services provide some of these capabilities by coding various interfaces and browser sniffing. I haven't had to, but I did need to put time in to solving the problem.
As an aside, the mobile market is *totally* under rated. The big guys are moving in _now_. It's only a matter of time.