Quarterly report (Q1 2014)

Preamble

Another three months passed, so it’s time for another quarterly report.

The good

Well, everything goes a little bit slowly but in accordance with the roadmap.

In the last three months we’ve fixed several bugs and security issues in Mibew Messenger 1.6.x, released two stable versions of it.

We’re still working hard on Mibew Messenger 2.x. And the actual state of the project give us hope that we’ll be able to release the alpha version of Mibew Messenger 2.0 in the next two months.

Meanwhile we’ve released the boilerplate plugin for Mibew, so that third party developers may take a look at it, fork it, and make use of it. (And we really hope that someday they will.)

And the last but not least. We’ve updated and improved Persian and Sweden translations. Moreover, the overall number of localizations of Mibew Messenger is now 36, because Mibew was translated to Korean.

The bad

So far, we’re lacking the valuable feedback from the community. At present time we have only a couple of active third-party developers willing to collaborate and to commit their efforts to the project. For example, last week we’ve published the aforementioned boilerplate plugin for the upcoming Mibew Messenger 2.0. And there are still no forks of it. It’s not a big deal, but a fact that the community is not as healthy and active as we want it to be.

And that’s the reason why the development of Mibew Messenger is not as fast as it could be. However, we’re not giving up. And we hope that the situation will change drastically once we release the first alpha version of Mibew Messenger 2.0.

And another thing. We know that there are a lot of people from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and other beatiful Spanish-speaking countries who use Mibew Messenger. However, we’re still unsuccessfully looking for a volunteer to become a translator of the Spanish version of the project’s site and a moderator for the Spanish board of the project’s forum. That is a little bit sad.

The miscellanea

And traditionally, some statistics.

The Mibew project has 103 forks of the main repository on Github hosting (14 new forks for the last three months). It has earned stars from 71 users (20 new stars for the last three months) and is watched by 27 developers (3 new watchers for the last three months). The overall number of commits into the master branch of the main repository is more than 1400 (about 120 new commits for the last three months, not to mention the commits into the secondary repositories and into the legacy branch).

The average number of downloads of different Mibew distributions is from 1.6 to 2.2 thousands per week. The largest number of downloads made from Russia (19.2%) and Brazil (15%). Followed with some margin by downloads made from China (5.2%), USA (5.05%), Turkey (4.71%), India (3.84%), and Ukraine (3.66%).

The users’ activity on the project’s forum is almost the same compared to the values of the previous quarter. There is an average from 1 to 2 new topics every two days, and from 2 to 4 new posts every day.

To sum it up. We, the Mibew core developers, have slightly increased our activity, while the community is now slightly less active than it was three months ago. At the same time, we’re looking into the future with a cautious optimism as the first alpha version of the long awaited Mibew 2.0 is already in the direct sight.

So, everything is proceeding as planned. The project is alive and moves on.