After a few years, several iterations of payment structures, roadmaps etc I have to ask the developers, “Is Vuo ok?”
I’ve ended up relying on Vuo in a professional environment and I have to ask what is going on here with the lengthy development times. While I truly do understand the limitations that small companies face, as well as the downsides of a roadmap/voting system as the initial one(community’s fault imo, not kosada) vuo now appears vastly different to the initial estimations and looks more like a 10 year endeavour. There are quite high-level features being implemented and voted on before groundwork is even in sight(more opinion, i know, but see things like fluid resizing while macros and universal multiport is missing for example ). As it happens, VDMX shares a user base with Vuo and their development has also gone very quiet in the last few years. Two amazing platforms that work really nicely together have slowed to a point where it spooks the people who rely on them for their businesses.
I definitely fell victim to the roadmap as I made the continuum of choices to invest the time and money into Vuo. Money well spent and great value IMO. Happy to spend more. But now I’m just getting frustrated at the dangling carrot of features chosen to be implemented, no idea when or to what extent, with the looming possibility of it being abandoned by its creators(inferred from the dev times and pricing polls etc). I’d love to be wrong but it seems pretty clear.
At the start there seemed to be so much effort going into being transparent about the development. This obviously backfired, fair enough, no promises etc. But what is going on? If there has been substantial engineering challenges or something then let us know. The roadmap may have caused as many problems as it solved but it certainly gave us an indication of the level of commitment to the development. Users have roadmaps of their own, which is why kosada’s was so appealing, what’s the plan?
Short answer: Yes, Vuo is OK :)
Vuo is not in any danger of being abandoned. We’re continuing to work on Vuo 1.3 as we promised. And we’re continuing to provide support through our public forums.
We’re in the midst of a lot of big improvements for Vuo 1.3, including the community feature requests marked “Chosen to be implemented” (https://vuo.org/feature-request). A lot of these involve substantial changes to Vuo’s infrastructure, so they take a while, and they’re not things that can be broken down into smaller chunks and spread across multiple releases.
We’re also taking a serious look at how to make Vuo’s funding more sustainable. So far, 12% of Vuo has been funded by the community through sales, and the other 88% has been funded by us (Kosada) through work-for-hire on projects mostly unrelated to Vuo. It would be wonderful if we could increase the amount funded by the community, because then we’d have more time to dedicate to Vuo development. We’re looking at how we can make this happen by adjusting the pricing (hence the poll), improving our marketing, and most of all by far, adding new features that will make Vuo more useful and usable.
I’ve been surprised by how much variance there is in what different people consider the must-have features. It’s an interesting problem, and admittedly sometimes frustrating for all involved, to try to reconcile a lot of different people’s ideas into a coherent and useful piece of software. That’s why I think our community feature requests system is a strength. Everyone gets to see what features are up for consideration and see which ones are scheduled to be implemented next.
You mentioned macros — several of the feature requests we’re working on involve improving usability of subcompositions, which should make them a lot more comfortable for everyone, and more familiar for people who are used to Quartz Composer’s macros.
The reason that we stopped using the roadmap was simply that it had become redundant to the community feature requests page.
I can’t tell you a release date for Vuo 1.3, unfortunately, because we just don’t know yet. But it is coming. One of Kosada’s core values is that we do our best to keep our promises, and part of that is being careful about what we promise. Ultimately I hope this builds trust with the community.
If you or anyone wants to help Vuo 1.3 arrive a little sooner, you can save Team Vuo some time by helping out other people on the forums if you know the answers to their questions, or you can spread the word about Vuo to get more people interested in using it and helping to fund it.
We’re looking ahead to Vuo 1.3 and well beyond. We’re committed to Vuo for the long term, and hope to keep developing and improving it for many years to come.
Thanks so much for the detailed reply, Jaymie.
The funding breakdown you gave is particularly impactful and inspires me to be more of an advocate for Vuo around the traps. I’ll take it on board in terms of being active for the sake of other users. I hope that some of my concerns, in the jungle of concerns you’re faced with, will come across as sensible. Keep up the good work team Vuo.
The 12%-88% is clearly problematic.
For those of us who clearly see a place for Vuo in our own product offerings the onus is on us to promote Vuo and add license to to our quotations.
I just made a small donation, so I hope that helps a bit. (at very least office coffee round)
Vuo really is fantastic, and as Paul mentioned is very important for many of us. I look forward to a bright future for Vuo, and hopefully in the not too distant future multi-platform support. (Window most probably would be financially sensible- but Linux for installation playback etc)
I really appreciate the dual license nature of Vuo. It allows us to see aspects of Vuo (source code) and have a connection to the deeper workings of Vuo. Can’t wait for Vuo 1.3!
On a side note: HAP playback has made a huge difference to me- as has the amazing work done in completely fixing the x4000 AMD GPU bug!
I too hope that Vuo will continue to grow. The program has been extremely useful in my research creation projects, and in my interactive stage classroom. I have just now purchased the Pro license as a vote of support for the team. Looking forward to the next release!
William
Any release date for 1.3 yet Jaymie?
Glad to hear it’s ok, I’m also using it everyday, thanks 
team!!!
Hey, @bLackburst. I checked with the rest of the team and we’re not ready to put a date on Vuo 1.3 publicly yet. But I can try to give you a sense of where we’re at.
The very biggest changes, the ones we were most uncertain about how long they would take, some of which ended up taking multiple person-weeks, are now complete. What’s left are numerous bug fixes, usability improvements, and some partially completed features. So we’re down to the kind of development work involved in a more typical Vuo release.
On the money side, we do have enough funding to carry us through to the Vuo 1.3 release. While we’re continuing to fund the majority of Vuo internally (through income from other work such as web development), the income from Vuo sales does help and we’re hopeful that it will pick up after the 1.3 release. That is one reason for investing so much time into the 1.3 release: to make it a significant enough change that people who have not heard of Vuo will find out about it, and early adopters who have stopped using it will give it another try.
I and the rest of the team really appreciate the goodwill expressed on this thread and elsewhere :)
.