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Around christmas last year I sat together with some friends (fellow computer science students) thinking about what we could do as a freetime coding project to learn the inner magics of Cocoa, earn a little recognition in the macintosh community and (at this point certainly unrealistical) win some awards.
One thing was for sure: I'd had to be Rendezvous enabled. I cannot really remember if any of us was the first to have the idea of writing a collaborative texteditor, or if the idea grew, erm..., collaboratively. Working in a way too small office™, we were quite sick of digging through furniture to reach the other side of the room in order to work together on some code.
Obeying Larry Wall's law of being a programmer (The three virtues of a programmer are: laziness, impatience and hybris.) we decided to create a source code editor that would enable us to work together, without getting up and falling over chairs.
After reading papers on collaborative editing we started working on February, 3rd. In this stage of the project the editor was still codenamed XXP or X²P, meaning extreme Extreme Programming, a pun on the fact that we wanted to do multiple input foci. By the end of february we came up with "Hydra" and the claim "Seven brains are tastier smarter than one."
After on-schedule (woohoo!) release on 31.03.03 we were quite amazed by the feedback we got: Users from all around the world wrote emails, Hydra got featured on Slashdot, O'Reilly and last but not least on Apple's Mac OS X downloads website, just right to Warcraft III. <grin>
Grep'ing through hydra.globalse.org's referer_log and looking what people are blogging/writing about Hydra is fun and deeply satisfying. I think we really couldn't have asked for any better experience with our first real world software project.
In related news, Hydra 1.0.1, a minor bugfix and localization version is due for next Tuesday, while Hydra 1.1 is scheduled for a mid-june release.
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