Received a Mark II. Congrats folks for getting these shipped! Beautiful packaging.
I also see a lot of criticisms here, which I’m sure will be addressed in time. I am glad to have one, but I will admit largely sympathy with the criticisms.
I recognize it’s not easy, and I’m sure there are reasons you stopped, but maybe you could manage expectations better by returning to a more public dev team model. I used to watch your YouTube dev meetings pretty religiously before they ended. They really added context to decisions that you made, and might have allowed you to manage critiques better, if only because some of us would have all the context.
In any case, I hope you don’t get discouraged by the response. Keep up the good work!
Thanks - and great to hear your Mark II arrived safe and sound.
We are getting all the repo’s for the Mark II opened up now. We’ve been trying a lot of different approaches over the last 6-12 months and to be honest, we were spending a lot of time addressing criticisms for things that were purely experimental. So we chose to do some development behind closed doors for a while. The idea was that it wouldn’t cause as much angst thinking that we were repeatedly making breaking changes, however the unknown is also pretty scary so I don’t think there’s any perfect answer there.
I do think what we have is a much more stable piece of software - admittedly it is only for the Mark II right now, however it gives us a better foundation to build from. Rather than trying to keep the plethora of not quite finished features of mycroft-core spinning, and trying to bolster it underneath.
Don’t get me wrong, mycroft-core isn’t going anywhere, there’s a range of projects that use it as a base, along with everyone that runs it on their desktops, Picrofts and Mark 1’s.
Getting some more info together at the moment to explain further about what Dinkum (the default software on the Mark II) is and why we chose to go this route. As well as what it means for our future priorities.
We’re a small team, and there’s so many moving parts to creating a globally available product. It has been a non-stop sprint for a long time but we shouldn’t stop communicating with the community at large, so we are trying to get back on top of that right now.
Have to agree with mcdonc, well done on getting this beast out and up and running. Am sure it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, so congrats.
So far, am very pleased with the MkII, hardware is pretty nice, even with “dinkum”, it is certainly a giant leap forward. Looking forward to the increased functionality in the very near future !