Fridae

This morning I watched Anderson Cooper read the names of the dead from the Orlando attack and I found myself starting to cry. I suppose it is the natural evolution of emotions to such an event, that started with shock, moved through anger and has ended with such sadness at the injustice of people loosing their lives for no fault of their own. 

The news is so full of stories of heroism, escape and messages that were sent from sons, daughters and loved ones that would not survive the night. I suppose crying is a natural reaction for a civilised human being.

Then on the other side we see the reaction of the not so civilised and not so human. So called Christian preachers that celebrate (in their words) “50 less paedophiles on the street”. The people who peddle hate, who find ways to twist words from books that are meant to promote love and acceptance and of course the members of the group that at least seem to have inspired this atrocity. 

However I find myself turning my mind to those stories we have all seen on the internet of executions carried out by the so called Islamic State against other members of the gay community that haven't taken place in our back yard but in Syria and other countries where this organisation operates. I haven't cried for them and I should have. I haven't found myself so moved that I had to make a statement on this site, and I should have.

I hope I can speak for all that work for Fridae that we must as human beings stand firm and redouble our efforts to speak up when these abominations happen not just when the death toll hits a high mark and not just when it is close to home.

Managing Director

Fridae

Last week we launched our new Fridae iPhone app and for me this marks a pivotal moment in our stewardship  of Fridae.

It has been just over a year (April 2015) since we took over the running of Fridae and I hope that members have been able to see a discernible improvement on the service being offered.

It is a shame that many of you can not sit where I do. Many of the changes that have been made in Fridae will not have been noticed by any of you. The developers here at DragonStack have slowly been wading through the millions of lines of code and have been enhancing and fixing many aspects of the site.

We are currently looking into making it easier to download the Android App in China. We have put a direct download on the site itself, but we are in the process of listing the app on some Chinese App Stores. Also you can expect to see both apps becoming available in multiple languages including Chinese.

We have also made a commitment to keep improving on our own development work. Both the iPhone and the Android app are now part of a regular updating progress. We receive daily reports of any issues directly from the apps and our coders immediately work on updates. You may have noticed that the apps have lots of updates. However, this is not only just to fix bugs, we also have a development schedule and we hope to bring you new functionality on a regular basis.

This is one of the advantages of having an in house development team and although they are not solely working on Fridae it does mean that we can react relatively quickly to new developments.

You may have noticed that we have made a few changes to the site as well. New headers, and new colour schemes have given the site a small face lift. We are still working on a complete rebuild of the site but we thought these changes  would help make the site look a little more modern.

Managing Director
Fridae