Someone from the Fritzing fab company (AISLER) has started a discussion on github about the future of Frtizing development. If you have interest, you may want to join in.
Peter
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Thank you for describing the current situation with Fritzing. I’m curious to know if the proceeds/royalties from sale placed with Fritzing Fab help to support the effort? It was not clear to me from the video.
I’m not connected to any thing official in Fritzing, so this isn’t definitive, but I believe the funding from Ainsler is going in to the development funding pool. You may want to post this in the discussion issue on github as I don’t know if anyone who would know for sure reads the forums anymore. I have heard that the goal for a finished release of Fritzing is $40k euros and the pot is currently at $6K euros (some 4 years on) so I don’t hold much hope of help from that direction. At this point I’m not sure the pool of developers is still even available. If Fritzing is to survive we need to attract people to do development. The offer in the video to partially fund a manager is very encouraging if it can be done, but the problem is still people willing and able to contribute. There has been previous discussion on github about doing a fork (which he referred to in the video). I pointed out that until there is some development effort ongoing and a refusal to accept the commits on the current repository a fork appears pointless. No development activity that I am aware of has occurred after that point (and the fork discussion died out). Currently the development environment is broken, I’m working on a parts commit to correct that, and after that intend to try and get a fix for the libgit2 issue on Windows working and see if I can get it released. One issue there is going to be how to get a release candidate up for testing. The discussion on github may help that if they can get the attention of someone with commit access, or I may be able to get it done via a pull request when and if I have something that looks workable. I expect that is going to be a while though as there are a number of problems of which the parts update is only the first.
Peter
Finally some good news on the development front. Thanks to Patrick Franken (CTO at AISLER, the Fritzing fab) it looks like development will restart. See the projected roadmap in this issue on the github repo:
While comments had died out on the original thread (I was thinking it had died, with all talk and no action like all the rest 
), it appears work was going on in the background. Hopefully Fritzing will live and prosper.
Peter
For what it is worth, I wrote a version of my parts editor in C++/Qt5. Available on github: https://github.com/RobertPHeller/FritzingPartsSVGEditor-QT5. This is basically a port of my Tcl/Tk parts editor (https://github.com/RobertPHeller/FritzingPartsSVGEditor). I’m thinking it could possibly be integrated into Fritzing or could exist standalone. If anyone has questions about it, they should feel free to E-Mail me. heller@deepsoft.com
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I don’t think any of the development team is reading the forum. Your best bet would be to open an issue in Fritzing-app on github I expect. As far as I know the current plan is to rewrite the parts editor in javascript whether that stays in javascript or is ported to c++ and Qt I don’t know, I don’t think they are as far as a working prototype at present. I tried the original javascript stuff when it came out a year or two ago and couldn’t make it work and decided to leave it to folks that know javascript. Too steep a learning curve for me to be useful.
Peter
I got an E-Mail message from “Kjell Morgenstern” today. I replied to it, but it got an error:
kjell@gmx.de: host mx00.emig.gmx.net[212.227.15.9] said: 550-Requested action
not taken: mailbox unavailable 550 invalid DNS MX or A/AAAA resource record
(in reply to MAIL FROM command)
I think he is on this forum, since he got the URL of the github repo from here.
The gist of my reply was:
I’m guessing you don’t have doxygen (and LaTeX) installed and the
documentation files did not get built, and thus the documentation resources
file was not built.
You could also edit main.cc and comment out the call to
qInitResources_htmldoc(). That should get rid of the link error (but the help
menu will be non-functional).
what’s about the new 0.9.4 release?
It has been delayed a bit (I think mostly because the fixing up the website is absorbing a lot of time). There is a nightly built test version of 0.9.4 (which I am running) available on github somewhere. Unfortunately I downloaded and installed it without recording the url and now can’t find the reference to where it is on github. I’ll continue searching and post a url when (if?) I find it again.
Edit: after much head scratching, found it. It is in
“releases” (3rd icon from the left on the line starting commits) currently CD-288. If you click on that you will find the various flavors of the preview 0.9.4 release there ready for download. Note that so far (there is a proposal in to change this), this version uses the same user file directories as 09.3b so I’d advise keeping a backup of those two directories in case of problems (although I have been running 0.9.4 since early July without problems so far). It is in all of our interests to download and try this version and report bugs on github.
Peter
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Many thanks, Peter 
I will… try to try 
edit: where “user file directories” is?! i have nothing about Fritzing under /user/home/ 
Depends on your OS:
Windows is
There are two user directories (with your parts and the parts database) which don’t get touched during an install (to not affect your sketchs during upgrades). On Windows they are in
c:\users\username\AppData\Fritzing\roaming\Fritzing (which is a hidden directory so you need to enable hidden directories in explorer) and
c:\Users\username\My Documents\Fritzing (where username is your windows id)
If you don’t have any parts or sketches you want to keep you can just delete those two directories and Fritzing will receate them, or you can move them aside by renaming them if you wan to keep something in them.
Linux:
~/Documents/Fritzing/parts
~/.config/Fritzing
Mac:
/Users/username/Documents/Fritzing/parts
~/.config/Fritzing
Peter
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Tks
It can be useful to promote this pre-release, or at least the “work are in progress”, on the main site if somebody have access to. And also in the Welcome screen on Fritzing itself (http://blog.fritzing.org/ ?)
That is true, but I expect it needs to wait til we have implemented the change that will allow a config file to set the user directories which (AFAIK) hasn’t been done yet. The new build system makes changing the current hard coded paths for different versions between difficult and impossible, so we currently need people that can deal with backing up and replacing if needed the user directories. Adding to that burden is an apparent bug that a manual rebuild of the parts database doesn’t appear to be working in 0.9.4 prerelease. I’ll report it once I verify I’m not making an error, but I don’t think I am as it works on 0.9.3b.
Edit: Despite thinking it was a bug, it doesn’t appear to be. I suspect I failed to clear the user directories on the original attempt as I can not make 0.9.4 prerelease fail with the user directories cleared before hand.
Peter
0.9.4 pre-release!