Two great Kickstarter projects ending soon: Durandal JavaScript framework and bitCommander File Manager

I like Kickstarter. It's not a store, it's an easy way to help fund creative projects. You back projects you find exciting at different reward levels, and then follow along with the project's progress. I blogged about the AGENT watch last June and was excited to see them hit 10x their goal - I'm really looking forward to getting my AGENT watch when they ship.

Preemptive disclaimer: As I said, it's not a store. You're funding a project with goals and risks and target timelines. The average contribution amounts aren't that high and I fund projects that I want to support, so I'm okay with that. If you're not, Kickstarter's not your thing, and that's fine too.

I wanted to help get the word out about two recent Kickstarter projects I've backed (and been tweeting about): Durandal and bitCommander. Both end soon (bitCommander ends on Jan 9, Durandal ends on Jan 10).

Durandal

Durandal is an open source JavaScript framework that helps you build full-featured single page applications. Ward Bell summed up what's unique about Durandal pretty well:

What’s so great about it? What’s distinctive about it? Rob has his inventory of laudable features (and its impressive). Here are some of the aspects of nextGen Durandal that I love … and that have no equal among alternative frameworks:

• Convention over configuration – I hate writing and maintaining “switch board” code to connect FooViewModel to FooView and FooRoute etc. I want to say “Foo” and be done with it … until and unless I have a compelling reason to break convention.
• Customizable conventions – Rob makes good choices but I’m free to define my own.
• Page life-cycle – Durandal has baked in understanding of the birth and death of “pages” so I don’t have to make up my own hacks to ensure that new pages are initialized on creation and cleaned up on destruction.
• Asynchrony throughout – Need to wait for the user to confirm or cancel before moving off the page? That’s easy in Durandal because asynchrony is plumbed through the page life-cycle and everywhere else. Dynamically load optional modules on-demand? Easy.
• Diagnostics – With debug mode turned on the console tells me exactly what choices Durandal is making for me as they happen. I can tap into that logging pipeline with my own diagnostics.
• Write less, do more – You all know what I mean. We all want to write less code. That’s the motherhood and apple pie that every framework promises. They usually deliver something else. Check out the nextGen Durandal sample video and tell me what other technology is that clear and concise.

We talked to Rob Eisenberg about what he wants to accomplish on the Durandal Kickstarter on Herding Code: Herding Code 182: Durandal Kickstarter with Rob Eisenberg

Download / Listen:

One of the things that really stood out for me was what Rob's doing with cutting edge browser and JavaScript technologies for the Durandal nextGen. He's investing heavily in a module system that works with ES6 modules, AMD and CommonJS. He's building on HTML Templates and Web Components. In addition to light weight, modular code, he's seeing 2-3x performance benefits over AngularJS. And it's all polyfilled so it works in current browsers while waiting for these features to ship. The result is that this is a great investment not only in a great next-generation SPA framework, but in the web in general: by backing Rob, you're getting real-world implementation of these specs early so we can get them right the first time.

The main benefit of backing this Kickstarter is that you free Rob up from consulting work so Durandal gets these amazing features faster. The secondary benefit for backers is that Rob will be producing some great training series - video and source code included.

As of now, there's still a good way to go on getting this funded. Pitch in and tell someone else to do so, too!

bitCommander

bitCommander is a really interesting file manager for Windows. It's already hit its funding goal as I write this. If you beat the end of the Kickstarter campaign, you can get a discount on it, and if not you'll want to pay the full price for it because this thing is looking really cool.

I like the recent changes to the Windows File Explorer in Windows 8 - the ribbon's really nice, and the file copy experience is vastly improved, for instance. But when you're doing things that involve multiple simultaneous views - like assembling a lot of files, for instance - having several instances of File Explorer open gets clunky.

Check out how browsing in bitCommander looks (all images below from the bitCommander website):

You might think it's just Miller columns (recently popularized as the OS X Finder columns view mode, but dates all the way back to 1980). That alone would be pretty nice, but there's a lot more to it. There are tons of other great features, but I think my favorite is the temp list and batch support.

There's a lot of other cool stuff, like tabs, nice thumbnail display (with details), intelligent filename shortening and more. I think what I like most about this is that it adds a lot of features but keep the design simple and focused. See what I mean on the bitCommander website.

Here's mockup of a possible additional feature that Milos is looking at adding: integrated command windows, sync'd to the current browsing directory:

Un-disclaimer: I backed both of these projects and don't get anything for talking about them. I just like them.

Go back bitCommander and Durandal!