After six months of development, I’m pleased to announce that an alpha version of Lighthouse is now open source. The alpha has most of the functionality the final version will, but runs on the Bitcoin testnet. Additionally the downloadable packages for Windows, Mac and Linux are only available to people who are willing to help test and debug. Nonetheless this is a good milestone towards beta and then the final 1.0 release.
We’ll get there faster if developers, artists and people who love user interface design help out. Much of the remaining work is fairly straightforward UI programming. You can join us on the developer mailing list or in #lighthouse on Freenode IRC. But even if you’re not a developer you can help us by testing the app and reporting bugs. If you’d like to do that, please post to the discussion list and request a link to the download for your platform. The app auto updates, but it’s important to realise that this version of Lighthouse cannot be used to crowdfund real bitcoins at the moment: we’ll switch to using the main Bitcoin network (and thus real coins) once we reach beta.
If you’re just curious what it’s like and don’t want to compile it yourself or request a download link, here’s a video giving a brief overview of its functionality. Not all features are demoed here, but it’s enough to get a flavour of what the app looks like.
Vinumeris 