December Mid Month update!

Quick progress for the mid month of December!

Right now I'm deep in overlay engine work.  The holidays and family in town has slowed things down a bit, but the end of the month is a wide open window for me to make some solid progress here. My current goal is to release it as alpha, and we'll work to finalize it in January as we make that an automation focused month. I have some great surprises for January planned and am very excited to get some long awaited features in there.

For overlays we're inventing a flexible system that should allow for a large amount of scenarios that aren't possible today for overlaying data, and my goal is to do it in a way that it's pluggable so that other data sources can add to it (think weather/stocks/rss, etc).  But first we have to crawl before we walk, so getting existing functionality from the infobar moved into a more flexible layout system is the priority.  

The last post around offline modes has generated quite a bit of internal team discussion. This has lead to a plan for how to handle many scenarios where wifi is not guaranteed which is very broken today.  Scenarios such as 'I made this for a loved one who isn't technical' and 'I brought this to a trade show' have holes.  We figured out a plan where we can handle that and handle the 'first run' page to set up wifi locally as well as time/date/region/hostname/password in one fell swoop.   I want to keep focus on the overlay engine, but my goal is to pick up that work immediately after so while we're getting feedback on overlays, we can tighten up that story and start fixing those scenarios.

That's all I have for now. I hope that those that have celebrations and loved ones in town are having great visits, and those of you traveling to see loved ones are having safe flights and pleasant travels.