Good to Be Back

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.