October 1st

[mikelove]

Mark your calendars.

Might be something on the website a few days earlier, but 10/1 is the official beta date, and regardless of any last-minute bugs / setbacks / likelihood-of-people's-PDAs-turning-into-piles-of-melted-metal we're committed to releasing something by then.

(also the 6-year anniversary of the release of our very first product, so that's as good a reason as any to pick it)

(plus the National Day holiday gives those of you in China some time to play with your new toy before returning to school/work)

 

[Shadowdh]

Yeah baby!!! Now thats some great news... well not the likelihood-of-people's-PDAs-turning-into-piles-of-melted-metal part but the release bit... christmas is early this year...

 

[ipsi]

Woot! It's great that we're getting a definite date (come hell or high water ), but I was hoping for something, y'know, nowish . Oh well. It's not that far away.

 

[daniu]

Wow!

But I might be in Italy that weekend and not able to get it the very day. Hopefully will be out before the weekend ... then I can show it off to my Singaporean friends in Rome

regards
Daniel

 

[sfrrr]

Should I really hold my breath for this one? It's really real?

If so, I'll schedule the week off.

Sandra

 

[ssaito]

you made my day, mike!

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - nowish would have been nice, I'd have loved to be able to spend at least a few hours this month doing something other than working on Pleco 2.0, but what we have now, though usable, feels very flaky / unfinished, and given the number of people who are instantly going to adopt Beta 1 as their main Chinese dictionary we'd really like things to be a bit more polished.

(and yes, I know we could release what we have now as a "preview," but unfortunately we're just too big for that - it's not a low-key preview release if 200 people download it the day it comes out and immediately begin sending us feedback / questions, preventing me at least from doing anything other than responding to e-mail for a good week or so)

daniu - there certainly might be something a few days early, the documentation/website work is going to take a week or so so if we can find a way to efficiently get people their 2.0 keyfiles we might be able to release something with the same code as Beta 1 but with no manual and none of the new paid upgrades a couple of days before 10/1. (with no e-mail announcement, and released mainly to ensure that there isn't some complete showstopper bug that we're unaware of)

sfrrr - It's pretty darn real, yeah. But no definite promises as to the stability or feature set included (though since pretty much all of the big features are already done it's highly unlikely any of them would be missing), so if you're going to take a week off you might be better off waiting until Beta 2 when things should be a little more solid and you'll have a better idea of what you're getting into.

 

[dennis_pelton]

Will 10/1 include a WM6 build that won't crash when I copy? :wink:

 

[mikelove]

Yes, it certainly should. It doesn't crash when copying on WM6 now, so we'd have to actually invent a new way to make it crash in order to keep this bug in the new version.

 

[dennis_pelton]

You work on that. :wink:

I'll cheerfully accept a non-crashing version whenever it's available. Mine crashes every time, if you need a tester.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Yeah Baby! And I thought I would get grey hair before 2.0 comes out . . . oh? what's that? a white hair on my head, you say? . . . Oh well, can't get everything you wish for!

Keep up the great work Mike!

We're supporting you every step of the way. Oh, and I am working on getting a group of Chinese 101 classmates interested in buying Pleco. Hope it works out . . .

Cheers!

Darrol

 

[ipsi]

Fair enough. I know I'll probably begin using it straight away for various things. Like most of my stuff. And I'd definitely like it to feel as finished as possible

 

[roddy]

Going to have to buy a calendar so I can circle the date . . .

 

[herve]

Great news !

 

[gato]

Going to have to buy a calendar so I can circle the date . . .

Going to buy a pen so I can circle the date on the calendar.

 

[daniu]

Hey guys

- please do not destroy your PDAs -

:lol:

 

[herve]

Going to have to buy a calendar so I can circle the date . . .

Going to buy a pen so I can circle the date on the calendar.

Don't spend money.... try a joint venture ! :lol:

 

[stephanhodges]

You mentioned documentation. I'd like to make a suggestion, that you put the documentation on a wiki, but at first control access to the wiki to people registered on the forum.

The reason to control access is just to allow you some time to get used to managing a wiki. It needs several people monitoring to avoid unwanted people spamming, etc. There are tools for this, of course, but starting simple might make it easier.

Along with that (if you wanted), you could farm out early pre-beta copies to volunteers who's SOLE focus would be to write up sections of documentation (or flesh out items, etc). I suspect you've got a bit of rough documentation already.

Wiki's are drop dead simple to install, etc. At least Dokuwiki and Twiki are. Dokuwiki is simpler, and Twiki tends to have a lot more plugins, etc. Those are the two I'm familiar with.

Even if this isn't feasible before 10/1, I think the wiki will still lead to faster and better user documentation, since Pleco owners are more of a fan club than a user base

 

[jugdish]

Bully

Yeah, here in Chengdu, I'd say I'm your #1 fan. Some might say I'm bullying others into getting on board. Now I can give them a date to go download it -- or else!

 

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - I love the idea of a wiki for tips/guides/etc, certainly there are areas which the manual doesn't explain in enough detail (and probably shouldn't, unless we want it to be 400 pages long), but I think the basic and "authoritative" documentation needs to come from us; there are still a lot of features which unfortunately just aren't that intuitively obvious, and it's a lot easier for us to just write them up definitively than to ask some poor volunteer to spend hours figuring out what a particular checkbox does.

So yeah, this might not be possible for the beta but certainly it makes sense after the finished 2.0 is out - particularly for tricky and OS-dependent stuff like installation and flashcard import there's really no way we could produce something as comprehensive as a user-created wiki would be.

Everyone else: thanks! I can't even tell you how happy I am to actually have some sort of release date at last, we've been keeping you waiting for way way to long now...