Padre 0.49 continues to mature and add features at a reasonable pace, and we're starting to see some of the plugins display a new level of maturity.
But Padre was always intended to be more than just a desktop application, it was intended to talk to the interwebs and do interesting things.
Three new server-driven features should appear over the next few months.
Padre Update is mostly what it sounds, a Padre-specific update notification mechanism (reusing the CPAN index for this is just too heavy at the moment).
Padre Telemetry is the server side complement to the Padre Popularity Contest plugin, which monitors and tracks your usage of Padre to help us learn about the features you care about.
And finally, Padre Sync will let us finally take advantage of Padre's split config design. Padre's config subsystem inherently understands that some config entries are related to you as a person, and some are related to your use of the current system. Sync will take the "Human" configuration properties and allow them to synchronise across the interweb, so that when you install Padre on a new machine you can just type in your email address and it will reconfigure itself on the fly to match your preferred settings.
We have a University thesis team stepping up to solve the last one, but we could use some help from Catalyst type people to help solve the first two problems.
If you've wanted to help out with Padre and know Catalyst/DBIx::Class, but hate Wx or desktop programming, we'd love to have you drop into #padre on irc.perl.org and volunteer to help out with the server infrastructure of the next generation of Padre features.
