Getting Involved

So you want to help out in the making of PyTide. Well, you are an awesome person! Congratulations!

For most stuff, you’re going to need to download the source code and then mess with it. For safety reasons, you need to fork it so that you’re not working on the same branch as the master. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. If you don’t feel like reading that link, then in summary, you go to the project page and click the fork button, which will make a new branch and give you the information you need to download it.

Once you have a “working directory” with your personal branch in it, you can start working on the project. There’s a bunch of stuff you can do to help:

• Expand the waveimages.txt file. It’s full of base64 versions of images in from the actual Google Wave. Most modern browsers will let you dive into the CSS and get the icons and scrollbars with a little copy and paste. Details are going to vary depending on your text editor and browser though, so don’t be surprised if it takes awhile to get into a good workflow going.
• Bug fixes. A lot of the basic code is already coded, or claimed by people who are already experts on that section of the program. We’re close to the point where we need people to report bugs, or better yet, dig into the code themselves.
• Documentation. A lot of the classes and functions are “fresh out of the oven,” and not very well documented. Instructions on how to use these things would be invaluable for new coders. We don’t want to be exclusive, people! We want potential developers to know How the Code Works.