[bt-devel] 2008 - 2009

[Martin Gruner]

Hello all,

it is my hope that all of you had a peaceful and blessed time of Christmas and 
New Year! May 2009 be a good year for you and the people around you.

Looking back, BibleTime has (despite a summer season of almost no activity =) 
seen a good year with substantial progress (just naming what I found out, 
there may be more I overlooked unintentionally):
	-new bookshelf manager
	-major KDE->QT porting efforts
	-changed from autotools to CMake
	-changed i18n system
	-changed to SVG icons
	-wiki as living project management tool
	-significant codebase quality improvements and refactoring
	-many bugfixes
	-1.6 bugfix release
	-freer license for the Bible Study Howto

The most important change, however, is that we have a growing and stable team. 
Eeli, who joined in 2007, has become the most important contributor. In 2008, 
Gary joined as the first and only person with professional QT experience. 
Recently, Thomas Abthorpe from the BSD team joined as well. He plans to care 
for the website and documentation. 
Please accept my sincere gratitude for all you valued contributions. BibleTime 
will only survive if we work together steadily as a team, dedicationg some 
time of our lives to it. The fact that you did so in 2008 makes me very 
grateful, and it is my hope that 2009 will become even better. Each of us has 
limited time. But exactly the same amount. So it is a question of personal 
priorities.

For the future, my impression is that we need to get out a 1.7 release as soon 
as possible (January!). After that, we can enter into a regular development 
cycle, releasing a new minor version every 1-2 months. This is going to be 
much more rewarding to us developers but also, most importantly, to the users. 
In that cycle, we should select small feature and refactoring sets for each 
new version, so that BT will gradually get more features, less bugs, less KDE 
and more QT.
If things work out extremely well and we get the Webkit problems solved, 2009 
might also see the first cross-platform release of BT, 2.0. Wouldn't that be 
great?

Again, thanks for everybody who has BT on his heart as a project to share 
their gifts and skills with users worldwide, even though they do not earn 
great fame in return.

God bless,

mg