***************** About CFS_Manager ***************** Purpose ======= CFS_Manager makes dealing with multiple file systems easy by letting you pretend you're only dealing with one of them. The idea for a cloud-multiplexing application grew out of a desire to backup files without having to buy a cloud storage subscription. It was clear that there was more than enough disk space out there, in the form of free storage providers, for most people to back up all their files. The problem was that you'd have to get a little storage each from many providers, and manage each account seperately, which is a lot of mental overhead. But what if you could just merge all of those accounts into a single, unified storage area? What if you didn't need to remember to check 20 different accounts individually and remember which file was in which container? What if that was all handled automatically? Thus, CFS_Manager was born. As projects go, it's clearly more work to develop an application than to just track the files in each cloud directly. However, if anyone else has a problem like this one, CFS_Manager will make life far easier for *them* - even if not for its developers. Getting To Initial Release ========================== All functionality present in 1.0 was written in the seven days following Thanksgiving, and then tested and documented for two days after. From the developer's perspective, if something works, it should be publicly available for others to benefit from (and critique) it. Development should obviously continue beyond initial release, but when the point of stable usability is achieved, everyone should have access. However, this means a lot of future functionality is still on the table at this point (there's an existing to-do list), and you're encouraged to suggest more. Furthermore, there are probably bugs left to squish, and lots of performance enhancements to make. If you'd like to help make CFS_Manager better, please read the Contributor Notes. About The Developer =================== Alison Streete is a novice developer originally from the Caribbean. She moved to Palo Alto, California this year and quickly assimilated to the local customs, such as software engineering. She's been teaching herself programming and computer science for the past three months. This is the first open, full-featured project she's created. Please let her know if there's anything she can improve - Both in code quality and general project administration. She tries to follow best practices where she knows them and will check out any style guides you can think of. About The Docs ============== The documentation for v1.0 was entirely written by Alison, mostly on Dec 3rd. As such, it's not as comprehensive as would be ideal. Ideally, no one who uses CFS_Manager should be confused for longer than it takes do a search. As such, anyone who uses this utility - at any level of technical proficiency - is strongly encouraged to contribute to the documentation. If there's anything you thing should be rephrased, suggest the rephrase! If anything confused you, complain about it! If there's something that you thought wasn't intuitive enough, make a note of it! Obviously, CFS_Manager tries to be clear and easy to use. However, for any case where someone could possibly be confused, they shouldn't *stay* confused long. On Spelling And Punctuation --------------------------- Throughout the console interfaces, an attempt was made to use American spelling conventions, as they're more typical of the industry. However, I [the author] naturally write in (approximately) British English, and writing out the entire docs in faux-American would have been tiring. As such, you should expect the docs to predominantly use British spelling and punctuation conventions. However, if you would like to contribute documentation, feel free to use either British or American conventions. A haphazard mix of inconsistent spelling choices will just make the project seem Canadian. /s ------------------- *CFS_Manager is released under the Apache 2.0 License, and the documentation is under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL 1.3* `Click here to learn more about licensing `_