The Intel App Innovation Contest (AIC) 2012 was certainly one of my highlights of the recent years. We developed an innovative touch aware application that combined an evaluation engine for numerical applications with the sensors offered by a modern Intel Ultrabook. The result was based on YAMP.
Now with YAMP being officially finished and improved it is time to give Sumerics the final touches. Actually, as Sumerics was offered as a paid application in the Intel AppUp store it was being kept behind closed doors for quite some time. The distribution was just too much to handle without any financial need and good reasons. So what will change now?
First of all, Sumerics will be distributed via Chocolatey - free of charge and without guarantee. Potentially, it will be also distributed via the Windows store by using project centennial. It could be that a distribution from the store comes in two variants: A free and a premium version. But nothing is planned right now.
Second, the source code will be published on GitHub. This will make issue tracking and improvements from (advanced) users possible. The code has been refactored and improved, however, it still lacks some of the things I wouldn't start coding without today, such a unit tests. I know - this sounds terrible, but in the AIC I didn't find the time to develop such a project and still spend some time on making it robust. Of course, there are no excuses for lack of tearing. Shame on me (PRs welcome!).
Finally, the application is more open than ever. It it's possible to include other languages or localize it. Some of these new features may be used some day. It should be noted, however, that I will only spend a minimum amount of time maintaining the project. Features are only added if it makes sense and if I find the time. Critical bugs will be fixed.
Why do I think that this is actually the right move? Keeping Sumerics behind closed doors won't help anyone. This way people who want to contribute, extend, or modify it get something to play with. Additionally, I finally can cross that from my to-do list. As with all my open-source repositories I promise at least a minimum amount of support enabling further development.