[HTC Vivid, Raider, Velocity] homeslice976:
For those of you that have been around these parts for a while, you may remember the State of Development updates that good ol' Gsleon3 used to update us with. These came for us at a time when development for the Vivid seemed to be at a standstill, and for those of you that were here, you remember why. For those of you who don't, let me catch you up a little (and I apologize for the bad feelings that this may drum up, but I don't want anything to get out of control again). So grab a beer and a snack, this may be a long one :)

It was about April, and development for the Holiday was still in its infancy. There were a few good ROMs being released, and generally, it was a good place to be. Then accusations of stealing other's work, accusations of corrupt moderators, and all around child-like behavior started, and it became the downfall of the Holiday forum at XDA. ROM threads started closing. Then came the bickering. Then the Devs left. Then the users began to play the blame game, and the "let me try to whine my way to what I want" game. All the best devs left and opened up shop in their own little corners of the internet (and I can't blame them one bit), and development for the device was no longer centralized. There were/are still AWESOME ROMs available for this device, just not on XDA. This always made me a little sad. As painful of a place as XDA (or any internet forum for that matter) can be at times, there's sooooo much good information crammed into one site that it has always been my one-stop shop, but that wasn't true any longer. I settled in, I found a home, but I kept a close eye on what else was happening across the interweb's Holiday community. I liked to keep my eye on one project specifically, synergy's CM10 project, because who wouldn't want JellyBean, right?

Now, a little more information for those of you who weren't around.. The original CM10 thread was opened at another site in July, where the project started. Syn put a lot of time and effort into it, but in the end, found it to be not worth his time to continue on a project he didn't see possible to ever be finished (mainly due to the ATT in-call mic issue and video issues), and again, who can blame him? He abandoned the project at the beginning of August. This is where mg picked the project up, and continued it with a few fixes himself, before somehow we caught the attention of h8rift. h8 has been awesome - cleaning up our trees, getting things in their proper home, and powering through anything that gets in his way :) It's so great to have him around.

Myself, up until October, had only ever had experience with things like making boot animations, icons, editing .xmls in .apks, and some slight .smali edits. Thanks to mg's excellent guide and a crapton of Googling, I learned out how to compile/build cm from source. Then I thought, "I wonder if I could do the same for other JB flavors?" So guess what? I tried, and it worked. Every single question I had along the way (with the exception of a few Ubuntu and git specific questions), were answered by a thread here at XDA. Cool, right?

I am very excited to see new ROMage out for this device...as I'm sure anyone who was here through the "Great Holiday Wars of 2012" would agree, I was pretty sure what we had was all we were ever going to see. Which again, would have been OK, cause there are some great ROMs out there, but I've never been the kind of dude to settle in on the same ROM for too long - that's why I came to XDA in the first place. Now as I'm sure everyone can see, through collaboration, this project is making HUGE progress! I cannot thank mg and h8 enough for keeping it going. This brings me to my last point...

I encourage everyone to participate, and offer suggestions, and share information - that is, after all, what a developer's forum should be about. The wealth of knowledge that's available at XDA is out of this world, but sometimes hiding deep within the threads, filled by off-topic chatter and users who have way to huge a sense of entitlement. Please always keep in mind that the things you're getting here are free. Hours upon hours upon hours of work go into these projects, just to be shared for very little asked in return. Wait, we ask for something in return? Yes - READ, SEARCH, and SEARCH AGAIN before posting. Like I said, there's already a wealth of knowledge here that's incomparable to other Android forums on the web, but yes, sometimes it can be trying to find that information. But it's not impossible. Also - keep an eye on the issues list. There are bugs. There will probably always be bugs. And as long as there are, they will continue to be squished to the best of our ability (though h8's ability is far beyond mine, so let's especially be nice to him :))

In closing - PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not let this place become what it was before. So far I feel like the atmosphere around here has been a lot better, but I know how easy it can be for it to slip back to where it was. So be respectful, don't ask for ETAs, and be thankful for what we have - cause what we now have is a TON more options that we had before.