Search Form..
In: Uncategorized| awesomium| khrona| personal
3 Oct 2010Lots of stuff has gone down in the past couple months. Let me give a recap:
Yup, that’s me in the fancy hat. I graduated in early August with my Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from Sam Houston State University.
Was a pretty wild ride– met some cool people and learned some neat stuff (mostly about myself– which was probably more important anyways).
I’m overjoyed that I’ve finished my degree but I’m really under no illusions about this thing; no degree (especially not a Bachelor’s) is a magic wand. If anything, university has taught me one thing: if I want something, I’m going to have to work for it— hard. Which brings me to my next topic:
In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea to launch a software company by myself while still finishing school.
As crazy as it was, things still somehow turned out alright– we’re now turning a decent profit and making new sales regularly. So much so, in fact, I recently hired my best friend and fellow programmer, Robert, to help out with development and marketing. I’m training him right now in my spare time and he’s already made a couple contributions (like the sample projects in the latest Awesomium SDK).
I’m also looking to hire a designer to help out with the site, branding, and promotional material— I designed most of the site, demos, and logos for Khrona and Awesomium completely by myself (which is pretty incredible considering I’m primarily a programmer) but it’s currently taking up a large part of my time that I’d rather allocate elsewhere (like the development of some of my other projects). Let me know if you have any recommendations!
It took a couple extra months to get out but we finally launched version 1.6 of Awesomium! I’m rather proud of the latest iteration of Awesomium due to its super-sexy crash isolation (multi-process architecture baby!), Flash support on Mac OSX, and mega-useful resource interception system.
We’ll be pushing out another release candidate quite soon (RC2) to fix a couple issues that testers found last week but, for the most part, 1.6 is approaching a stable release. (After nearly a year of development, exciting!)
We’ll be attending Game Developers Conference Online this week (I leave for Austin tomorrow morning). This is my first GDC and so I am absolutely stoked– doubly so concerning that GDC Online focuses on game development in the context of the Internet (which is completely “my thing”).
Also, we made t-shirts! Here’s a blurry pic from my iPhone:
Yes, that is “Awesomium” printed in the style of the “Metallica” logo.
Come say hi or grab a beer with us if you’re attending the conference as well! We’ll probably be wearing these bad-ass shirts the entire week.
Well, I’ve just returned from a three-month hiatus and I gotta say it feels good to be back. I took the time off so that I could focus on two things: planning my new company and finishing my degree.
Speaking of which, I’m happy to announce that the KHRONA site finally went live. I went through at least nine different major design revisions until I settled on the final template (which happened to be the first design, go figure). Check it out at KHRONA.com and tell me what you think.
There’s still much work left to be done with the site– I’m using this new service, CodeBaseHQ, to manage issue tracking, repositories, and team management for Awesomium and our other software. I’ve only had the past week to play around with it but I’ve already fallen in love with its simplicity and power. Anyways, I spent the last few days integrating their XML API so that users can view all open issues directly on our site. I thought it would be rather trivial until I realized that I’m limited to 80 API requests an hour so I ended up spending most of my time writing a fancy little SQL-based cache to get around this. This turned out to actually be a good thing since the cache also helped speed up page loads (woo, fun accomplishment of the week).
Oh, by the way, Awesomium v1.5 is now available for download/licensing! Click here to check it out. Honestly, this build was quite ready to be shipped since at least October but, since the project has now switched hands to KHRONA, I couldn’t launch the release until the company was fully formed and live.
As for those who have expressed concern that $5000 is a little steep for a commercial license, I think you’ll be very pleased to hear that we are working out an additional pricing tier that will be much more friendly to indie-developers. Until this materializes, please feel free to try out the SDK in your own projects– Awesomium is still free for non-commercial use and internal evaluation, you only need to purchase a license once your commercial application begins distribution.
I’m now working on a maintenance release of Awesomium 1.5.1 that includes a few fixes and enhancements (primarily, the ability to catch and handle external navigations– such as those initiated via target=”_blank” or a Flash plugin). Look for it in about a week.
Development of Awesomium 1.6 has been well under way for a while now (the branch actually started back in August). The new build will be bringing some mighty new features including: multi-process architecture (for crash isolation among other things), Linux support, performance boosts, and better compatibility with HTML5. I’m still debating whether or not to include support for HTML5 video– I’m considering dropping it for now as it will increase the size of the library significantly and I don’t see too much widespread use of the tag. (If you think otherwise, please let me know in the comments).
As for future plans, my second priority after Awesomium is launching Akarui, our cross-platform Flash embedding layer. Not much work has been done on the project since last year and I’m eager to start back up on it. We’ll just have to see how much time I have left over from my other exploits.
In: awesomium| khrona| navilibrary| programming
11 Oct 2009
The final build of NaviDemo v2.0 has just been released, get it while it’s hot! In case you don’t know what it is, NaviDemo is a fully-functional 3D web-browser that was created to demonstrate one of the possible applications of Awesomium. It’s actually really fun to use as more than just a demo; think of it as a visual alternative to tabbed browsing– you can group related web pages by location, see the full contents of multiple web pages at a glance, and intuitively navigate through your active web-browsing experience in the context of a 3D terrain. Try it out, you might like it!
Check out the following video for a little preview:
On a different note, I now recognize that students, university-folk, closet programmers, and other tinkerers make up a large part of the Awesomium user base. As a student myself, I think it would be most unwise to keep this technology out of reach of some of the most inventive and innovative minds around– we’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of discovering all the uses for Awesomium and since this project is still young, I wouldn’t want to do anything that might stifle such beneficial activity. With this realization in hand, I would like to announce that Awesomium v1.5 will be free for non-commercial use.
We have come to some conclusions regarding commercial licensing as well and will be announcing some of those details in the coming week. Stay tuned for those and more updates and enjoy the new NaviDemo!
In: awesomium| khrona| programming
28 Sep 2009Hey everyone, I just wanted to give a quick update as to the current happenings with Awesomium and KHRONA.
First off, I must admit that I underestimated the time it would take to put together a company, draw up a solid set of licenses, and put all the necessary infrastructure in place to sell software online seriously. I personally apologize for the delay but I am confident that my decision to take it slow and steady in this critical juncture will benefit everyone in the end. On that note, things are finally falling into place and we’re almost ready to announce further details regarding the release of Awesomium v1.5, stay tuned folks!
On the development side, I’ve been putting together a new, cross-platform, SDL-based demo as an embedding example for the upcoming release. The “Web Flow” Demo is a simple web-browser with a 3D cover-flow-like interface:
In other news, a fair amount of engineering has been put into development of a new test suite to ensure the stability of current and future releases. Awesomium v1.5 has now undergone internal testing for the past month and I can confidently announce that it is ready for production release. I’m really excited about this development and can’t wait to get this build out the door and into your hands!
Hey there, I’m Adam Simmons and this is my blog. I generally use this space to write about software (usually my own), games, emerging web technology, 3D stuff, and other nifty things as well as post photos and videos that are relevant to my life.
