Getting free with Naracea 1.4.0

There is actually very little changed in Naracea 1.4.0 which I’ve just released. Sure, there is new update checker which checks once a day for new updates and takes you to download page when there is one, and I’ve fixed one or two bugs, but that’s pretty much it.

One might wonder, why it took me so long to do so little. And the truth is, that while I still care about Naracea, I started working on something else. If you remember, I initiated work on this crazy text editor because I wanted to write something. And since now the editor does pretty much everything I need it to do, I tried some writing. And I realized, that I don’t want to just write dead words, immutable snapshot of current state of my mind, because that’s just… too limiting.

Today’s media can be so rich, that having just one predefined way through the story seems, well, inadequate. So I downloaded Unity3D and started to learn how to use it to build a game. And I downloaded Blender and started learning how to create 3D models, and how to texture them. And I read whole lot of articles and seen number of video lectures about game design and story telling in games. This kind of stuff. You see – I was having lots of fun.

And I realized: this is awesome, this is what I want to do now with the limited amount of my spare time. And I felt bad about leaving Naracea abandoned, because I think it is solid product with features that more people might find useful. But the problem is, that I’m kind of bad in marketing application like this, thus not many people know about it, thus I miss feedback which is essential for further development. And my motivation goes down.

And I was thinking some more: what should I do to get back the right spirit to work on Naracea. Not every free hour, of course, because now I have story to tell (through a game) and I want to work on that, but at least sometimes an evening here or a night there. Creep a feature in from time to time, just to keep it alive. And I figured what is the problem, and what I need to do to put fun back into Naracea’s development.

I need to make it free.

Really. As simple as that. Anyway, it was almost free anyway (it was my intention to not create crippleware, and to make shareware notification as unobtrusive as possible), so in fact it is not a big change (just removing licensing code and change of the license). But the application feels completely different to me now.

I don’t need to worry about lots of things I did worry about. I can, for example, upgrade to .NET 4.5 without worrying application will not run on Windows XP (.NET 4.5 is not supported there) and enjoy the huge performance improvement WPF applications have in 4.5 in comparison to 4.0 or get rid of the old WPF ribbon control and use the one from 4.5 framework (which is far from ideal, but it is somehow better). I can add features easily, test them with less fear of making eventual paying customer angry. It is freeware, I write it, you use it, if there is a bug, let me know and I’ll fix it and everybody’s happy.

I feel I can be much more open about the development now, I can turn this blog into something more personal, and if there is enough interest, I can always add PayPal donate button to let people show that they appreciate what I do.

So from 1.4.0 Naracea is free. For now it is free as in a free beer, because making my repository completely public would need some work I don’t want spend time with right now, however there is at least issue tracker and wiki page available on BitBucket, and I also moved away from releasing Naracea.AvalonEdit as a ZIP file (which was really annoying and stupid from me), and you can access it at BitBucket as well (unfortunately there is no history right now, but future changes will be pushed into the repository). And I’ll make open source as much as possible of the stuff which will be added from now. And what do I plan to add in some foreseeable future?

Well, I have two things I want to do: first is extracting exporters from the application to separate plug-ins with defined interface, so whoever wants to add export to other format can easily write exporter and add it to the application. Second thing is scripting support. At this moment I think Python scripts will be the right choice (via IronPython), but let’s see. And of course, there will be usual bug fixing and little improvements here and there.

So, this is it. If you want, go to download page and give Naracea a try.