I imagine a lot of you have already guessed this, but just to state it officially here: unfortunately it's going to take at least a few more weeks for us to get 2.0 finished, so the June 5th release date mentioned in my announcement e-mail earlier is going to be off by a bit.
We're putting the finishing touches on the next 2.0 beta testing release (Beta 5) now and it looks really good - every feature does in fact seem to work, there are certainly still a lot of bugs but any given checkbox/button/etc should now do something pretty similar to what it's supposed to do. We've also cleaned up a few areas of the interface that were still problematic, like the Manage Cards screen for flashcards (which has gone through 3 or 4 revisions but which we're finally happy with).
Beta 5 should be out within a week or so, and we're planning to accompany it with an actual installer and a very basic instruction manual (basically just a list of each option/command/etc and what it does) so it should be usable by a greater number of people than the earlier betas. And since all we have left now is bug-fixing, the betas should come pretty rapidly after we release Beta 5 - hopefully one every week or so until the product is done.
Sorry about the continuing delays - this is the last time we're ever going to try to do this much in one release; in hindsight we would have been much better off rolling out the new features gradually, one release every 6 months or so, rather than rewriting everything from scratch and making you all wait 2 years for a new version. So at least we've learned something from the experience
Oh, and one little bit of good news for Mac users: we've just licensed a handwriting recognizer that works on Mac OS, so we're tentatively planning a simultaneous release of the desktop version of Pleco (the real one, not the "preview") on Mac OS and Windows. It'll require an Intel-based Mac, unfortunately, but if you've wanted an excuse to buy that shiny new MacBook Air this may give you one. Hopefully ready by the end of '08, though given the main subject of this posting I'm not sure if you should really believe that.
We're putting the finishing touches on the next 2.0 beta testing release (Beta 5) now and it looks really good - every feature does in fact seem to work, there are certainly still a lot of bugs but any given checkbox/button/etc should now do something pretty similar to what it's supposed to do. We've also cleaned up a few areas of the interface that were still problematic, like the Manage Cards screen for flashcards (which has gone through 3 or 4 revisions but which we're finally happy with).
Beta 5 should be out within a week or so, and we're planning to accompany it with an actual installer and a very basic instruction manual (basically just a list of each option/command/etc and what it does) so it should be usable by a greater number of people than the earlier betas. And since all we have left now is bug-fixing, the betas should come pretty rapidly after we release Beta 5 - hopefully one every week or so until the product is done.
Sorry about the continuing delays - this is the last time we're ever going to try to do this much in one release; in hindsight we would have been much better off rolling out the new features gradually, one release every 6 months or so, rather than rewriting everything from scratch and making you all wait 2 years for a new version. So at least we've learned something from the experience
Oh, and one little bit of good news for Mac users: we've just licensed a handwriting recognizer that works on Mac OS, so we're tentatively planning a simultaneous release of the desktop version of Pleco (the real one, not the "preview") on Mac OS and Windows. It'll require an Intel-based Mac, unfortunately, but if you've wanted an excuse to buy that shiny new MacBook Air this may give you one. Hopefully ready by the end of '08, though given the main subject of this posting I'm not sure if you should really believe that.