ThunderBlog

Can you guess where I got that title?

I graduated from high school recently, and I’ve already been approved to my dream college. The problem is that college is expensive and in this world, you have to make money by working.

This means I don’t have time to keep developing my freeware projects anymore as I have to focus on paid work instead.

But I love working on ThunderBrowse because it’s something new and I love helping people. I hope that you guys can help me too.

The truth is that I don’t get paid to work on ThunderBrowse. Ads pay out once every eight months and I only get about $100 dollars (ads pay near to nothing [it's such a ripoff]). I also don’t get many donations on behalf of the project.

The thing is that I have lots of great ideas for features to add to ThunderBrowse, many of them that you guys, the community, have suggested that I add. With college approaching, I need to be focusing on paid assignments.

But you can help, and this is where Summer of Funding comes in.

What is Summer of Funding?

Summer of Funding is a little of experiment that I want to try with the users of Thunderbird and ThunderBrowse in general.

Users can donate money that will support the continuation of ThunderBrowse development and help me pay part of my college tuition for the first year.

I’m going to set up a milestone system, so that whenever the monetary amount hits a milestone, I’ll start working on a new feature that will greatly improve ThunderBrowse.

I’ve yet to decide how exactly new features will be chosen for each milestone (milestones are every $200 dollars [thus there are 5 milestones]) but most of these features will be ones that are most requested. I might put up a poll to decide what gets worked on next.

3.2.7 will be the last version that will have anything new or big in it as I’ll not be available to work on ThunderBrowse during college. If you really want to get some new and improved features and fixes added, then help me out!

How can I help?

You can donate to the project. Currently, we accept payment via Paypal (you can pay with your credit card [you do not need an account with paypal to donate]).

Click here to donate to the ThunderBrowse project.

How much do I have to donate?

You are free to donate the amount of your choosing.

Donating lots of money does not increase your chances of anything. It does, however, make me happy to know that people care and will decrease the amount of time until the next milestone.

I would appreciate at least $15 dollars per person, but you are the sole decider of what you want to spend.

Do I have to donate?

Donating is really up to you. I would really really appreciate it if you did donate, but you don’t have to.

What will you do with the money?

The money is to help me pay for part of my college tuition.

Can’t you just get money from…?

Scholarships? I’ve entered a lot of them and I’ve only won one of them. FAFSA suggests taking out a hefty loan to pay for college (I rather not take a loan [especially the amount that they suggest]). I’m already doing a lot to earn money to pay for college, but I still need a lot more to get even close to college. Summer of Funding is an idea that I hope will contribute to the money I need to pay for college.

When is the last time I can donate?

September 4th 2009. I’ll compile whatever I had at that time and release it. I would prefer that you don’t wait until the last minute to donate, but you can donate whenever you want (the sooner the better).

What are milestones?

Every time the donation counter hits a $200 dollar milestone, I’ll start working on a new ThunderBrowse feature. After work has been completed, I may or may not put up a beta for you to test/use. Betas will probably be codenamed like: 3.2.7 Panther or something to that effect.

How much do you need?

I really need about $5,000 USD (this barely scratches how much I have to pay), but I’m currently asking for $1,000 USD to help kick start funding. If the response to this project is great, I’ll bump up the amount I’m asking.

How many milestones are there?

$1000/$200 = 5 milestones. There is a milestone every $200 US dollars.

What kind of features are planned for the milestones?

I’ve only planned a few so far and I’ll get to more if I get more donations (meaning, this really gets off its feet).

Here’s the current list (in no real order):

1. Using native Thunderbird 3 tabs
2. Improving history (this will help lead into the Awesomebar)
3. Adding the Firefox awesomebar
4. Document printing support

Can I suggest a feature?

This is probably the one time I’ll actually take suggestions for features and work towards them (provided a milestone is hit). But yes, you can suggest features simply by leaving a comment on this post. There are a couple of things that you cannot suggest and those are:

1. Cookies support (this is a bug in Thunderbird that we cannot fix [Mozilla states that they are working on it [and they are]])
2. Embed Firefox/IE – Not only can we not do this (because the core is too similar and we don’t have write abilities to it) but it probably violates some trademarks/licenses.

What happens if you don’t get enough money?

If Summer of Funding fails then I won’t be able to add in these new features or work on ThunderBrowse as much. If I have completed previous milestones, I will release my progress up to that point as ThunderBrowse 3.2.7. I won’t be able work on ThunderBrowse as starts (the college I’m going to has a lot work involved, so I cannot spend time during school working on ThunderBrowse). I really hope this campaign raises some money because I would love to keep working on ThunderBrowse.

What if no one donates?

Well, then I won’t be able to work on ThunderBrowse over the summer (right now, I can only focus on paid assignments) and probably won’t be able to release a new version.

What about translations?

Translating all the new features of ThunderBrowse will be the last milestone of this fundraiser. If we do not hit the last milestone of this fundraiser by the time it is over, I will not get 3.2.7 translated (however, if it is apparent that we will not be making progress on anymore milestones, I will get it translated).

What will users that donate get?

They will get the wonderful feeling that they are helping out a bright student to move on to future pursuits and fulfill his dream AND I’ll add every person who donates $20 USD or more (if the donation is in another currency, it will be converted and rounded to the nearest US dollar) to the extension (a lot like how Firefox’s Invitation program worked) in a special credits section of the extension. This will be visible from about:donors or something. I’ll go into more detail as summer starts to end.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 12:31 am and is filed under 3.2.7, Essays, Important, News, Press, Site, Summer of Funding, Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.