From the very beginning, NUKE has been thoughtfully designed for seamless integration with existing tools, including popular development environments such as Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider, Visual Studio Code, and ReSharper. The extensions we've developed for these environments have always been considered the icing on the cake. Even in cases where an extension is temporarily incompatible or unavailable, it doesn't mean you can't run or debug your builds; it simply needs a few extra keystrokes, which we find quite manageable given the substantial benefits NUKE provides. Implementing extensions and keeping them up-to-date, however, is much more complex. In this blog post, we'll address a couple of changes that should make this venture more worthwhile.
Marketplace Presences
We've decided to withdraw our project's presence from all marketplaces and discontinue the more user-friendly method of installing extensions. The main factors for this decision are:
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Managing multiple online presences consumes a considerable portion of our limited time. Ensuring that new users have a positive initial experience with the project demands up-to-date information, which we prefer to maintain in a single place on our website.
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Recent marketplace reviews have been quite unfavorable to our objective to create a positive first impression. It's apparent that 1-star ratings – due to bugs or temporary incompatibility – do not provide motivation for those contributing to a free open-source project to work harder.
As a replacement, we'll provide extension downloads exclusively on our website, while issues can still be filed through our repository with adequate descriptions.
Star to Download
We've noticed that many users only seem to drop by our issue tracker when something needs fixing for their critical businesses. While we're always happy to see new faces, it's also noticeable that a large majority haven't hit that "star" button on our GitHub repository.
With our shiny new backend, we're introducing a gentle nudge: Before unlocking access to our extensions, we'll be checking if folks have "starred" our project. While it's a small action, it certainly carries some significance and helps us showcase the popularity of NUKE, which can be appealing to potential contributors and users.
So, we warmly encourage you to give that star a friendly click and enjoy the benefits of being a supporter in our community!
Extension Editions
Moving forward, we'll provide our extensions in two editions: Community Editions with a reduced set of baseline features and Professional Editions containing all existing and forthcoming advanced features. We understand that some may have concerns about this change, but let's take a closer look at the reasons behind it:
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We want to give our group of dedicated long-term supporters the recognition they deserve. Access to the Professional Editions will be the first step to reward their contributions, and we plan to roll out even more features, such as remote debugging, in the future. We'll also grant access to maintainers and active contributors of other projects to support the open-source community at large (please contact us).
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Balancing the growing demands of maintaining NUKE with our available resources has become increasingly challenging. Therefore, we strive to grow the number of sustainability contributions by creating incentives. While sponsorships help us allocate more time to develop new features, we would also love to see more users becoming contributors and taking ownership of specific subsystems.
Use the account icon in the navigation bar to login via GitHub and download your favorite extension.
Happy building! 👷