Last day to contribute to Sandstorm
By Kenton Varda - 31 Aug 2014
There’s just a few hours left in our campaign, which wraps up at midnight tonight (Pacific time). This is your last chance to grab some stickers, a t-shirt, hosting, or a LAN party invite. Starting tomorrow we’ll be heads-down coding, so you won’t be hearing from us quite so often. ;)
We’d like to take a moment to thank our Key Individual and Corporate Sponsors who together contributed $16,384:
Thank you all for your support!
– Kenton, Jade, Jason, David, and Garply
PS. If you want to help us a little more by clicking some things:
- Star Sandstorm on Github
- Follow @SandstormIO on Twitter
- Follow Sandstorm.io on Google+
- Like Sandstorm.io on Facebook
- Subscribe to the Sandstorm blog using your favorite RSS feed reader
We did it! And one more app...
By Kenton Varda - 28 Aug 2014
Thanks to you, we’ve reached our funding goal with four days to spare. We are honored to have been pushed past the goal by renowned Free Software developer Audrey Tang, who among many other things is one of the core developers of EtherCalc, an app which has been ported to Sandstorm. Audrey becomes our second Key Individual Sponsor. We were also helped immensely by our second Corporate Sponsor, HumanWeb Networks. (A third Corporate Sponsor came in this morning; details coming soon.)
We are still accepting contributions! Now through Sunday is your last chance to pick up one of our campaign perks and get yourself listed in our credits. Go grab a t-shirt and a sticker pack (featuring the Sand Cat), preorder Sandstorm hosting, or grab one of the four remaining LAN Party Invites, or become one of our key sponsors. Go to the campaign »
One More App: MediaWiki
We’ve just released our last app port of the campaign: MediaWiki. This is the very software that powers Wikipedia, packaged as a Sandstorm app. You can use MediaWiki on Sandstorm to host a private wiki for you and your friends or teammates. Go install it from the app list now, either on your own Sandstorm server or on our demo.
Meet the Sand Cat
By Kenton Varda - 27 Aug 2014
Allow me to introduce Sandstorm’s new mascot, the Sand Cat. Based on the adorable desert animal who can go for weeks without drinking by using only the water from its prey, the Sand Cat is the handiwork of talented illustrator Néna Nguyen.
The Sand Cat’s story will begin to unfold over the coming weeks, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek so that we could let you know that we’ll be adding Sand Cat stickers to every sticker pack sold as part of our Indiegogo campaign. So, if you haven’t had a chance yet, grab a sticker pack for $8 or a t-shirt plus sticker pack for $32.
Streaming Music with Groove Basin
By David Renshaw - 26 Aug 2014
Today we are releasing our port of Groove Basin, the ongoing product of Andrew Kelley’s three year quest to build the ultimate music player.
With the Groove Basin app, you can upload music to a Sandstorm grain and listen to it from anywhere. Groove Basin provides loudness compensation, gapless playback, and support for a wide range of codecs, including all of the common ones like mp3, flac, ogg, m4a, aif, wav, and wma.
As befits a Sandstorm app, Groove Basin also has some interesting sharing features. You can connect one client to speakers and let other clients act as remote controls, with the ability to control playback and upload new music. Alternatively, you can set up a long distance listening party, where geographically dispersed listeners share a playback stream. We’ve integrated Groove Basin’s permissions system with Sandstorm’s, so only the instance owner is allowed to perform destructive actions like deleting tracks or editing tags.
I highly recommend that you give it a spin, either on your personal Sandstorm server or on the demo.
Nominate Apps for Sandstorm
By Jade Wang - 25 Aug 2014
What app would YOU like to see on Sandstorm?
We’d love to hear from you. From now until the end of the campaign, you can tweet in your favorite apps to our app survey. Just nominate them with a tweet, and they’ll make the short-list for the App Committee to consider. For instance: “I’d love to see @joindiaspora on @SandstormIO! http://igg.me/at/sandstorm”
The apps will be presented in a list to the App Committee with the number of votes (tweets) it received, starting with the most highly requested. The App Committee will then decide what makes sense to work on first.
How it works:
- If the app has a twitter handle, please use it (or include a link to the app, if they don’t).
- You can tweet multiple apps, and ask your friends for retweets.
- Retweets count as votes.
- For your vote to be counted, your tweet should begin with a character other than @ and contain @SandstormIO and a link to the Indiegogo campaign.
- Hint: Use the “tweet” button on the campaign page to get your personalized referral link so that you can receive referral bonuses.
We’re in the home stretch, 83% of our way there, with just one more week left in the campaign! We need your help to make Sandstorm happen.
P.S. Of course, you can always port the app yourself rather than wait for us. Please drop us a line if you do. :)