Archive for July, 2010

Speed improvements coming to OpenSpark

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Friends list was responsible for a considerable slowdown in Spark’s performance. Today, I discovered that this is a characteristic of the XBox Live website – it requires cookie re-validation every 15 minutes or so, and occurs even on regular desktop browsers; probably to keep applications such as OpenSpark from hammering the servers.

In any case, the delay has been reduced from around 25 seconds to anywhere between 6 to 11. Because this has been a pretty significant thorn in my side for a while now, there will likely be an intermediate release of OpenSpark, based on version 1.1, but with this particular bug squashed. Look for a new release some time in the next two weeks.

I’m still looking for some help from those of you who are getting false authentication errors, and can swing Android SDK.

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Spark is now OpenSpark. And open source

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

As I hinted would happen several times, Spark has gone Open Source. OpenSpark is the Open and Free reincarnation of Spark; now hosted at SourceForge, and licensed under the GPL.

Other than supporting Open Source and Android, there are several goals behind this:

  • There are various errors that only those that experience them can fix (they seem to be limited to specific accounts)
  • Critical issues noted in the README file (please read it if you’d like to contribute) require attention that I simply cannot currently provide
  • OpenSpark could always use more translations to new languages
  • The constant conspiracy theories about Spark stealing credit card numbers, and other nonsense are getting annoying and need to end

Again, if you’d like to contribute, please see the README file; first and foremost. You can also contact me at openspark-devel AT lists DOT sourceforge DOT net (un-mangle the email address above).

The current stable release is still 1.1 – same version as the one on Android Market. Most of the critical fixes noted in the README apply to this version as well, so if we can get them fixed, there will be another pre-2.0 release (2.0 will include the newer features, such as services, and AppWidgets, when they are completed).

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