Hi.
Last night, like most Fridays, we posted a new beta build of Elements, including Silver, Oxygene, C# and Fire. This beta (gamma actually) is a release candidate for the next incremental update to Elements 8.1 that we are planning to ship next week — probably with little or no changes over what’s in the gamma.
Our plan/goal i is that this update will be the last for Elements 8.1, and that we’ll be moving to the alpha/beta phase for Elements 8.2 after this. Elements 8.2 will be the next significant update to the product, which we have already been working on for a while, and we’re planning to ship that towards late Summer/early Fall.
Especially with so many new users having joined us for Silver, i want to lay our how our beta program will (continue to) work, moving forward.
As always, access to there semi-weekly beta builds we ship has been one of the benefits of having an active subscription to Oxygene or C# (or a Suite). This will continue, so as an Oxygene and/or C# developer, make sure that your subscription is active, to maintain week-to-week access to the beta drops, and to be able to run them (unlike release builds, beta builds expire when your subscription expires).
For Silver users, continues access to the beta will be one of the perks of contributing to Silver’s development with a donation (or of course purchasing the full Elements package).
Before Silver shipped, we had an open invitation to the Silver (and Elements 8.1 in general) beta. For anyone who joined the beta at that time, your current beta access will continue until the end of June. After that, you can of course continue using latest released version of Silver (which will be the aforementioned June update, at that stage) indefinitely, as well as of course new versions as we ship them, such as 8.2 later this year.
If you are a Silver user, and interested in beta access, we hope you’ll consider contributing, to get continued beta access, and other benefits. Remember that we do rely on revenue and contributions to finance the compiler development — we’re not a huge company with big financial backers, and tom us Silver is not a commodity that is financed by other business branches, as is the case with most free tools these days.
If you are a contributor (present or future) to Sugar or the SwiftBaseLibrary, please contact me to get your beta access extended at no charge.
In the mean time, we hope you’ll enjoy the current gamma and next weeks release, and we can’t wait to share the first Elements 8.2 alpha build with you, really soon.
yours,
marc