Quote from: Ente on December 07, 2012, 03:30:47 PM

I finally am in the process of switching to armory!
A few questions..

a) I guess no news about "importing" an address when only the public address is known? I imagine this should be possible, as we have the blockchain with all transactions of this address?

b) Imported addresses: The paper backup warns that imported addresses are not included in the paper backup. Are they included in the digital backup / wallet file?

c) and OT: I wish to have bitcoind always running in background. Does anyone know a way to "connect" bitcoin-qt to the running bitcoind, instead of armory, when armory is closed? I would like that option, as I have a lot of wallets from bitcoin-qt left, and start all fresh on armory. And yes, that's nothing I expect the programmer of armory to code ;-)

Thank you for this nice client! I already love it, never restarting the client again to switch wallets! :-)
Also, what is currently the limiting factor in armory's development? Time, funds, tasks, coders?

Ente

Thanks Ente:

(a) There are no updates on that yet. If you have the private key, can you import it into the offline wallet and re-create the watching-only wallet and re-import that on your online computer. Also, even if I had the pub-key import feature, you can't import public-key-only addresses into a full wallet. Every address in the wallet must have the private key, or not have the private key (it's too complicated to deal with mixed wallets... you would just create a new wallet for that).

(b) The digital backup does include all imported addresses. However, I'm more of a fan of paper backups, so I recommend printing out the individual keys (select "Imported Addresses Only"). Especially, if you are importing lots of keys and making digital backups, you don't know which ones have been backed up already without loading the digital backup and checking -- it's obvious if you have them printed, though.

(c) I'm not sure I understand this. There should be no problem running only bitcoind, and Armory should connect to it the same as it would to Bitcoin-Qt. Unless you are talking about running bitcoind on a different computer... (it will be possible to connect to remote nodes, in the future, but it's not ready yet).

Time is definitely a limiting factor in the development. Almost-full-time job, just got engaged, holiday parties, etc. My fiance knows how much enjoy working on this, and gives me lots of room/time to work on it, but it would definitely help if I didn't have a job. But I also don't see how I could sustain on Armory alone without converting it to a paid-product model (and even then, I'm not sure the market is big enough, and the stability of Armory is high enough for that). Right now I'm mostly happy with the arrangement, despite wanting to spend more time on Armory and less at work, but this is the most stable for me.

People getting more involved in the code would be great. Though, I understand Armory code base is big and scary (about 25k lines of code, so far). It is fairly well-commented, but it's also flush with corner-case catching, error detection, and luxurious informational dialogs which really obfuscate the intent of the code. It can be tough for someone to see what the code is doing exactly when I've add multiple ways to detect various error conditions and half a dozen message box warnings to accommodate different conditions. But I'm not sure there's a good way around that...

I was considering making a plugin system for Armory, that would allow users to create new tabs on the main screen. There's some details that need to be worked out so that it can be done "safely" (or as safe as is reasonable). That would definitely make it easy for users to contribute new features that could later be merged when they're fully developed. Though, I'm not sure that's the best way to get other people involved in the code...