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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.

Sand cat illustration #2

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.

Sand cat illustration #1 Sand cat illustration #3

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.

Groove Basin Screenshot

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”

Example tweet screenshot.

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:

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. :)

Campaign Recap

By Kenton Varda - 22 Aug 2014

There are just under 10 days left in our campaign. As of this writing, we are 78% funded. If you haven’t contributed yet, now is the time! Go to Ingiegogo »

Let’s take this moment to recap everything that’s happened over the campaign so far. But first, some brief announcements.

Quick Announcements

App committee seats are sold out. We had been doubling the price for every 10 seats sold, but we’re all out of perk slots on Indiegogo, so we’ve stopped at 30. However, you can still get a seat on the committee by becoming a Key Individual Sponsor ($2048 includes-everything perk) or by being our top referrer (see referral program, below).

Heading for the playa? We know a lot of you San Francisco geeks might not have internet for the next week. Don’t forget to contribute before you leave, because the campaign will be over when you get back!

We finally added an RSS feed. The Sandstorm blog now has an RSS feed. Looking for an RSS reader? Try TinyTinyRSS on Sandstorm. :)

Our Core Sponsors

Our first Key Individual Sponsor ($2048 level) is Roger Wagner. Roger is known for many things, including having written the first book on Apple II programming and creating HyperStudio. As a sponsor, he’ll be featured along side our own team on our web site and in our credits. Thanks, Roger!

Our first Corporate Sponsor ($4096 level) is draw.io, a powerful web-based diagramming tool. As a sponsor, their logo will be displayed on our site and in our credits, and we’ll be helping them get draw.io on the Sandstorm app store. Thanks, draw.io!

Would you or your company like to become a core sponsor? Consider that your contribution alone could increase our funding level by four or eight percentage points, and we’ll feature you name and picture/logo on our web site and credits for at least two years. Thinking about it but not quite sure? E-mail Kenton to discuss terms.

Campaign Recap

Blog posts you should read

App ports we released

Talks and Interviews

Press

Referral Program

Don’t forget about our referral program:

If you refer someone, and they contribute, we’ll give you your choice of:

a) 1GB bonus storage for every $10 referred (on our managed hosting service, for one year).

b) 10% of your referral total in app store credit. Remember that our app store will support a pay-what-you-want model for open source apps, so this basically means you can donate your credit to the developers of an open source Sandstorm app of your choice.

The top referrer will additionally receive their choice of a LAN party invite (see the $512 perk) or a seat on the app committee (with $256 voting rights).

In order to receive credit for your referrals, be sure that you are logged into Indiegogo, then use the buttons under the video on our campaign page to share. These buttons will generate links that track the fact that they came from you.

Apache Wave on Sandstorm

By Kenton Varda - 20 Aug 2014

In an unspeakable act of technical necromancy, we’ve revived what was once Google Wave and placed it on the Sandstorm app list. You can install it now – on your own Sandstorm server, or using our demo – and use it to… um… whatever it is that Wave is for. We’re still trying to figure that out too. We’re pretty sure it’s amazing, though!

OK, joking aside…

Put simply, Wave is a collaborative document editor with inline, nestable comment threads. What do you use it for? Well, one thing I think it’s great for is design discussions. Your root Wave is your design proposal. People can comment on individual parts, you can reply to those comments, and so on. It’s easier to keep threads organized than in an e-mail discussion. For example, here’s what a recent design discussion I had with security guru Jas Nagra might have looked like as a Wave:

Wave screenshot

As you may recall, Google released Wave back in 2009 to great fanfare only to pull the plug on it just a year later, citing lackluster user growth. Whether that was the fault of the product itself or of a botched rollout and bad messaging is hard to say. In any case, Google was kind enough to release their code, and since then the folks over at Apache have been keeping development going as Apache Wave.

Apache has made sure that Wave keeps progressing. But, how exactly does one use Wave today? Well, a few people maintain demo servers, but these are not meant for real use and have no reliability guarantees. Instead, if you really want to use Wave, you are supposed to set up your own server.

Now there’s an easier option: Install it on Sandstorm.

Moreover, with our port, it’s easier than ever to actually share a Wave with your friends. Normally with Apache Wave today, you must convince your friends to first create accounts on your Wave server so that you can then share with them. For our Sandstorm port, we’ve adapted Wave to rely on Sandstorm for sharing. What that means right now is that to share a wave with anyone, all you have to do is send them the URL. They don’t even need to have a Sandstorm account. Sandstorm’s sharing model will become more sophisticated in the future, but we consider it critical that sharing with anyone – whether they have an account or not – be as frictionless as possible.

We see companies shutting down useful apps all the time. Often, they offer users the opportunity to download their data as massive zip files full of useless XML. Wouldn’t it be great if these companies could give you not just your data, but also the app, in a format that you could easily keep using? We hope that in the future, developers will decide that it makes more sense to convert their failed SaaS offerings into Sandstorm apps. This way, companies can cut their costs without leaving users out in the cold.

If you want to see Sandstorm succeed, there are 12 days left to contribute to the campaign.