First I will be going through the proposed features in this blog then covering deviations from the original plans.

SDK Community iOS App
There were plans to improve the interface is this Free/$0.99USD app to incorporate more aspects of the websites and add then-new features of iOS 7.

The app did receive the updates fairly early in the year. It gained support for pull-to-refresh on almost every screen, and most screens were rebuilt from scratch for speed.

Blog Enhancements
There were plans to add categorized votes, like "+1 funny" or "-1 trolling" and flag inappropriate comments.

Though these features were not added, blogs did receive enhanced upvoting in the way of avatars showing who made the upvotes.

Bulletin Boards
In many ways, the BBs are about a generation or two behind blogs in terms of features. There were plans to improve quoting/replying, add post previewing, and make searching easier.

Sadly, no functional changes were made to the BB system last year.

GamePadPaint.com
This was going to be the newest addition to the SDK Community family, bringing over many of the features from the other websites.

Since there was just no time to construct a completely new website split-view interface on a console that wasn't selling well for much of the year, I decided to drop these plans completely. (The domain name has actually already expired.) What made the other websites in this community stand out is that the browsers all had special features but weren't the best at browsing the typical website the Internet has to offer (due to memory, processor speed, etc.). The Wii U console's Internet browser is a state-of-the-art WebKit browser that can do almost anything a browser on a computer can do. When I visit the community on the Wii U, I just go to 3DSPaint.com.

3DSPaint
Many of these features were still unfinished, so the plans were to bring them to the level of completion of DSiPaint.

Aside from some bug fixes, there was nothing new to report here.

Library
The Library had just launched as 2014 started, but there was still a good amount of work to do for it.

Early in the year, several new books were submitted, and they continued to trickle through the year. (The current count of publications sits at 16.) There were several tweaks done to the Library's interface and submission process.

Unplanned Updates
*Member profile Timeline
This has been jokingly called "the stalker screen". It shows the past 30 days of all public activities undertaken by a member, such as blogs, blog comments, bulletin board posts, paintings, etc. It also provides quick links to each of those content posts.
*Backend redesign
I generally don't report these types of changes, but it was so wide-spread that it's worth noting. I had rewritten the backend code for almost the entire community so that pages would load faster and database connections would be more efficient. This may have been noticeable in certain areas that would experience lag in the past, like chatrooms and bulletin boards.
*Server migration
Everything was moved over to servers with solid-state hard drives last April. I'm sure many will recall that painful process, where there were hours of downtime. The end product seems to have been worth the effort, though!

Extra
I try to be up-front with everyone concerning this community. If you remember a couple years ago (when there were around 7000visits/day), there was enough ad revenue that we would periodically have competitions, and I would award Nintendo eShop cards. (There was even a game-making contest with the prize announced at the end of a Wii U console.) The funds also helped to keep the servers updated, and I was compensated for the 1000s of hours of work. In mid 2014, ad revenue completely collapsed. It went from about $300.00USD/month to about $3.00USD/month (with no decrease in website traffic). With the current set-up, the servers cost about $135.00USD/month (from a peak of $225.00USD/month) to keep running. Since revenue was fairly good for a while, I have just lived with it, but money has gotten tight.

I enjoy this community and visit it several times each day, so I have no plans to do away with it. Plenty of you also enjoy yourselves here, and I wouldn't want you to lose the opportunity to keep coming. I'm sure many of us have even made lifelong friends here, so it has a nostalgia factor, as well. Still, with the decreased revenue, I have had to shift most of my focus to HullBreach Studios projects (while still making periodic updates here). Since the websites for those games are hosted on the same servers, I consider their revenue to more-than cover any expenses, once the initial investment of the team is paid later this year.

Since I am juggling my time between work, family, HullBreach Studios, and this community, it's difficult to predict what will continue to be updated here and when, so I will forgo the annual blog that predicts the changes for the upcoming year. I would like to say that this community will continue to receive updates, and we are planning on extending membership to an upcoming social aspect of the HullBreach Studios website to keep the community evolving.

If you have any ideas of what you would like to see added, please continue to request them in the Help Desk. As I can, I will try to work on them.