Handful of Nothing

Hello everyone (actually I know you are not that much =) ). As we are approaching the launch day of the Canola2 beta, I think it’s good to explain a couple of things.

 1st : why open beta? Well, in the first version we did a closed beta testing to check how it was going to work in peoples device but we were not able to really “test” it properly and a lot of problems happened in the installation. So it was our fear that we wouldn’t be able to do a proper testing with a small amount of users. Add to that also that we were caught by surprise with a deadline smaller then we expected, and we really have a beta now. So we need the feedback from interested users to fixes all basic bugs that can appear and after that (having a good infra makes it easier to grow in feature number without making a bloated unstable software)

2nd : Where is the feature ______ that I saw in the site or the flash? Some of the features are in the oven, and as they were planned for a little bit later release we decided to let them out to do not put in risk the stability at this point. So you will notice some missing screens, maybe some plugins are missing and some balls are not there but the good point is that we are really going to keep this version quite alive with regular updates / additional features.

3rd : Wheres the plugin support ? This is the major update in our opinion in the architecture side, and this need extra love. So we will wait for the basic bugs to come, fix them as fast as possible then we will release some of our plugins as open source examples of how to write plugins. So expect this in the first set of updates. We don’t want to let people write plugins right now, then some user shows us some nasty bug that makes us break the users plugin. So first we make sure everything is working nicely then we release the documentation / examples to the coders interested in writing plugins.

4th : So canola will leave the beta status? Sure. As much as we like to see those “forever beta” applications I think we will make clear when Canola2 reachs the version 1.0 and let everyone knows that, and of course keep it improving over the time.

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Conclusions :

Yes, we are actually not ready to release a final version, and even doing the most that we could (I can say: the guys worked overnight for more than 4 weeks and weekends) we did our best for the date. And we will improve it so fast that I know you guys will really enjoy the speed.

 Price:

For those that told me that  “what is the point of giving canola for free and not making it open source” well I will start a new method of payment : it’s the first-usage-video-with-comments-WARE. Just send us a video of you installing / using canola with your feedbacks and we will be grateful for almost 379 thousand seconds =)