2026 will be the year of the Faircamp desktop application

I am absolutely stoked to announce that yesterday I've officially been awarded a second grant in the netidee.at open source funding programme of the the austrian Internet Stiftung.

With their generous support I'll be able to spend about half of my working hours next year to build something very exciting and dear to me: Faircamp 2.0

In a nutshell, 2.0 will reimagine Faircamp as a graphical desktop application. You will soon be able to use Faircamp right from your desktop environment, and you no longer will need to interact with the file manager, terminal or plaintext files to use it. That is, unless you want to of course! The command line interface is here to stay, and it will likely receive a significant speed boost and other collateral benefits through the new concurrent architecture that the graphical interface will build upon.

And there's another thing still: On the occasion of reimagining the architecture, I will re-evaluate the data model (= the way in which a catalog is organized and represented in folders and manifest files) and see if it's possible to make small but elementary changes that will ensure Faircamp's fitness for a wide range of usecases (outside of just music publishing) for many years (decades?) to come. This is both a delicate but also essential development that I would like to give my fullest attention, in order to not (pardon the language) f... it up. :)

There is still a sizable amount of things for me to finish off in 2025 (as well as project planning to wrap up before Faircamp 2.0's development can commence) but I will probably soon be reaching out to you - the Faircamp community - with an invitation for how you can help me get the data model changes right, because I will definitely need and seek input for that - stay tuned.

And that is all, rejoice!