As of July 29th, Livescribe will close its third-party developer program. With cloud technology and mobile information access becoming increasingly important to our customers, Livescribe is realigning its focus and resources on cloud access, storage and services. Our recent introduction of Livescribe Connect, which enables customers to easily send notes and audio, as a pencast PDF, to people or destinations of their choice like Google Docs, Evernote, email, and Facebook, is an important step in this direction.

Applications in our online store will remain available for download and purchase pending compatibility with future Livescribe software updates. We will continue to accept applications submitted for publishing in our online store, as well as pattern credit requests through July 22nd. At this time, the SDKs and developer website will no longer be available. If your application is close to completion and you would like to have it posted in our store, please contact us atdeveloper@livescribe.com for support.

We greatly appreciate the time, effort and support you have given to Livescribe and our platform over the past three years.

Thank you again for your contributions.

Sincerely,

Joyce & Michael, Livescribe Developer Programs Team

Byron Connell, Livescribe CMO

The full announcement is available on Livescribe’s website here: http://www.livescribe.com/errors/developer.html As one of the major custom paper developers, I was rather disappointed with Livescribe’s decision as Livescribe’s platform is one that I have greatly enjoyed developing for. I get between 4-5 thousand page views a month on this website and at least half of those are from people who are interested in using my custom paper products. Within the weeks that followed, I saw many, many forum posts, emails, and comments on this website all filled with one message:

I’m a new Smartpen user. Now that Livescribe’s closed the Developer Program, is it over? Am I too late to join in and use Custom Paper?

The preceding is my paraphrased version of several Private Messages sent to me through the Livescribe Forums. Unfortunately a recent forum overhaul has prevented me from accessing any of those Private Messages and I was forced to paraphrase from my memory. At first, I was forced to tell them that yes, they were too late. But that soon changed with the release of my Custom Paper Deployment Tool. Since then, I have been getting many requests from users to develop different kinds of custom paper including music staff paper and I have been forced to tell them that I cannot simply because I do not have access to any additional pattern license. I have been directing users to this thread on Livescribe’s Get Satisfaction page: http://getsatisfaction.com/livescribe/topics/tommy-1l7gjj and asking them to add their voices to the people asking Livescribe to bring the Developer’s Program back. Jeff, a member of Livescribe’s customer support team is working internally to make sure that people inside Livescribe know that we want this. If you want the Developer’s Program back, which will allow the creation of additional applications and custom paper products, please go here: http://getsatisfaction.com/livescribe/topics/tommy-1l7gjj and tell Livescribe that! The more people that voice this sentiment, the greater the chance that Livescribe will listen to us and bring back the Developer’s Program.

I for one was very excited when Intense Debate announced WordPress.com Sign In. I don’t know if you have noticed but Automattic has slowly been implementing that across all of their platforms. However, across their other platforms, they have also included account mergers, merging accounts between services with the WordPress.com account with identical email addresses. That is where they really shine. I’ve had a WordPress.com account for a while, because I needed the API Key for Akismet. I’ve also had a Gravatar because I love not having to set my avatar up on every site I start up. Late last year, they merged the databases of Gravatar with WordPress.com and my two accounts became connected. There was no longer a disconnect.

However, the Intense Debate implementation failed in this context. Account Mergers are not possible at this time. The Intense Debate Team said:

If you already have both IntenseDebate and WordPress.com accounts, don’t worry – we will be merging your accounts in the next phase of our integration, so keep commenting!

That’s good, it means that integration is coming but it’s still not quite ready for mainstream use. Let me give you my own story.

I decided to try out Intense Debate myself to see if it would fit the needs of this site. I ended up creating a new Intense Debate account, not realizing that I could just sign on with my WordPress.com login and password. I linked this site to and my comments synced perfectly with Intense Debate. Then of course, I read this post and decided that I wanted my Intense Debate profile to be the same as my WordPress.com one. Of course, I deleted my Intense Debate account and then reset the plugin. I tried to connect it to my “new” account but of course, it wouldn’t let me do that. It seems that you need to disconnect your WordPress blog from Intense Debate before deleting or switching accounts. Now I’m stuck, without Intense Debate. My hope is, that when the merger goes through properly, they will realize that my orphaned blog belongs to my WordPress.com account and attach the two together. That would save a lot of hassle for all of us who don’t read directions properly before beginning.

Therefore Intense Debate isn’t quite ready for WordPress use. It’s very close and it’s getting closer, but there is still a short ways to go. Once they manage to complete the merger, I for one will be quite pleased with them. I’m just hoping the “next phase of [their] integration” happens soon!

You can view the plugin page here. Or download directly from the WordPress Plugin Repository here.

Currently version 3.0 is the most stable version with no bugs that I know of!

Enjoy

2.0

• Second Version of bbPress Admin. It has been adapted to have a backend interface to set the forums directory.
• Looks Neater and is much easier to use.
• Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.2 and bbPress 1.0.1

1.0

• First Version of bbPress Admin. It is very simple and rudimentary at this point.
• Working with WP/WPMU 2.8.1 and bbPress 1.0.1

You can find the plugin at it’s homepage. Right now Version 2.0 is stable however there are a few small bugs that are being worked on! Version 2.1 is in BETA on SVN!

Additionally, the homepage of New bbPress Admin has been updated so that it shows the most recent information (almost identical to the information on the http://wordpress.org plugin page.