Harper Desktop Is Available for Download

Harper Desktop is fi­nally avail­able for down­load. It’s been about a month since Jason and I started work on it for Radical Speed Month. In that time, we have worked hard to cre­ate a mean­ing­fully func­tional ex­pe­ri­ence and it is avail­able for down­load to­day.

That said, it’s still early work. There are bound to be bugs and edge-cases we have not con­sid­ered. That’s why we are re­leas­ing it un­der a “beta” flag. It’s avail­able, but do not ex­pect a su­per pol­ished ex­pe­ri­ence yet. The hope is that we can work with the com­mu­nity to build a su­per pol­ished and com­fort­able ex­pe­ri­ence, but that will take time and, more im­por­tantly, bug re­ports.

Alongside sup­port for apps like Slack and Discord, Harper Desktop will bring our phe­nom­e­nal gram­mar check­ing to crit­i­cal apps for long-form au­thors, like Scrivener and Microsoft Word.

What’s Next

I plan to en­ter a pe­riod of hard­en­ing, both for Harper Desktop and for every­thing else we of­fer. There’s a back­log of bug re­ports and pull re­quests from the du­ra­tion of Radical Speed Month that needs to be ad­dressed. If you are one of the many peo­ple who opened one of those things over the last month, know that I am not ig­nor­ing you. Give me a sec­ond to catch my breath, and I will get to you.

After that, I hope to work on more ad­vanced style sug­ges­tions, po­ten­tially us­ing the greater com­put­ing power avail­able in the Harper Desktop app. More de­tails to come.

What I Have Learned

Building Harper Desktop has given me a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what an ef­fec­tive team looks like. Not just what an ef­fec­tive team does or says or what method­ol­ogy they em­ploy. What they look like.

Harper Desktop was col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Jason and my­self. He has far more ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing in teams than I do. The chance to ob­serve the kinds of ques­tions he asks and un­der­stand why he asks them was in­cred­i­bly valu­able, and he car­ries a finely tuned feel­ing of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion that is dif­fi­cult to con­vey over text. He is a man that knows what is im­por­tant, and what is not. I learned a lot from work­ing along­side Jason. I ex­pect to learn more from him in the fu­ture.

With this ex­pe­ri­ence, I in­tend to make some sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments to how Harper as an open source com­mu­nity op­er­ates. You should ex­pect to see me be­come more avail­able, more of the time. Af­ter all, we are in this to­gether