A message for August Patreons

I want to take a second to express some thoughts about those of you that have supported me on this journey, and to talk about August a bit and beyond.

First I want to say thankyou, to all of you.  I've had a few private messages come in about people that have had to leave this month due to money being tight, and I want all of you to know that I appreciate your support, your belief in the project, and that I appreciate you.  You can always come back in the future and will be welcomed, and thanks to feedback I'll start putting the features that get released on youtube so that those that can't be part of the Patreon can better track the project should they see a feature that brings them back in.  Again..thank you! 

For those that are staying on, we are planning a release for September but we are still deep in development so I'm not sure what all will make it.  Right now the playlist engine is coming along and we have prototypes of overlays for the movie poster fans.  There is Exif work happening plus a bunch of smaller fixes that have been requested. And we're always keeping an eye on additional feedback coming in.

August was an amazing month for this Patreon, we were able to get a release out which moved the bar, had some solid fixes, and previewed the next generation of this project...where things start to move away from static images and into the ability for users to write plugins to display their own data, to show content from the web, to play videos from other services.  The next release will build on this further as we evolve a playlist engine.

But just as importantly, this month was the best month ever we've had for feedback.  The discord chats started firing up, and thanks to that feedback we opened up the public github.  That will help us communicate issues status and we can get a feel for the impact that issues have on you so that we can prioritize the work.  Much of the work and behind the scenes discussions has the phrase 'well are the users hitting it'.  If we hear your feedback then we bump the issues up quite a bit, and if we don't hear feedback, we sometimes immediately drop the issue.  The teams thinking is 'make sure our users are taken care of'.  So your feedback matters, and everything that is said we document, discuss, and spend time to investigate. Sometimes it's an easy fix and we get it in, sometimes we have to plan and it'll take time (for those asking about the timer to turn it on/off, we hear you, and we're working on it!).   We were able to fix quite a few issues already that will be in the next release (sci fi theme will be fixed up!)

I want to thank everyone for the messages, the pictures in discord of setups, the feature ideas, and the feedback.  We are always working hard to make this project better, and we're working towards a vision of the best digital board available.  We want it to be the best for showing family photos, movie posters, digital artwork, security camera feeds, current weather and more. 

For those that have to leave in August, you should have a solid build of software, and please enjoy it and know you have my thanks. For those going into September be ready for one heck of a beta release in about 2 weeks and then we'll work to stabilize it based on feedback again.  We also should have an art pack next month, and I'm planning on doing a live video Q and A to meet some of you and to engage further.