I try to post something every couple of months, but 2024 has been more than a little challenging in that regard. About a month ago I bought and moved into a house about 10 minutes from where I’ve been living since 2018. The new place is really nice, but the days leading up to the move — and since, for that matter — have imposed a heavy toll on energy and time, two things I have in limited supply under normal conditions. Progress has been a little slower for the last 8 weeks or so as a result. I remember Michael Phipps, founder of the Haiku operating system that I helped build for more than a decade, was fond of comparing Haiku to a slow train: not very fast, but progress was consistent. The way that Mensago has progressed over the years feels very similar in that regard.
As I mentioned in my last news post, I am laser-focused on building a demo. I can only do spare-time development for so long, as I’d like to see this thing fly long before I reach retirement age.
Showing Off
To use a marketing term, the demo needs to show off Mensago’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) — what makes it special. Although the first production-quality release of Connect will have many compelling features, the demo will be built to support a pitch presentation for corporate sponsorship that focuses on just a few key points:
- The Mensago platform enables the fully-encrypted transmission of potentially-sensitive information
- Mensago was designed from its foundations to be secure and while offering a low barrier-to-entry for everyone.
- Contact Requests establish relationships in which boundaries can be set
- Contact Requests themselves are protected from abuse
- Mensago Connect acts like Gmail without having email’s vulnerability to spam and phishing
- Mensago Connect will be a comprehensive digital organizer for day-to-day life in both personal and business contexts
In order to support these points, Connect needs to be able to reliably do a number of different tasks:
- Create, edit, and manage notes
- Send and receive messages, including Contact Requests
- Synchronize information between multiple devices
- Perform multifactor authentication when new devices log in for the first time
- Receive updates to a contact’s information, such as email address, phone number, etc.
- Perform basic abuse prevention: strip links and attachments from Contact Requests and silently drop communications from blocked contacts
This list of tasks might sound like the bare minimum of effort, but the amount of support code needed to send and receive a Contact Request is decidedly non-trivial.
What Next?
Connect is at a point where the hardest parts are done. Today I finished getting Contact Request exchanges completely working, showing in these screenshots.
Not only can Contact Requests can be sent and received, it’s possible to create and edit notes, and the basics for device sync and multifactor authentication are in place already. The rest really isn’t hard, just a lot of polishing work to do. I’m really hoping that 2025 will be the year that I can go full-time developing Mensago. Only time will tell. Be well, my friends, and best wishes.