Are we all beta testers?

[michaelkenward]

It is great to be able to chew over issues here with the folks who wrote MW2010, and to get such positive and helpful responses, but I am surprised to see so many issues reported here that really belong in the class of "should have been sorted out in beta tests".

I have done many a beta test over the years, including some heavy duty (make that expensive) software. Rarely have I seen so many comments that really needed ironing out before the first public release.

As much as anything I am thinking about features that are said to be still in the works, such as hiding messages that have been processed already. Likewise, the loss of customised sounds.

To my mind the new way of doing some of these things breaks MW. It just ain't the same software.

It isn't often that a new release of software comes without important features that we all grew to love in the previous version.

OK, we are promised fixes, or improvements. I do hope that those of us who stumped up the upgrade fee on day one (or two) don't find that these arrive the day after out "subscriptions" lapse.

In all, though, I like the new version. I particularly like the ability to preview emails. This is especially welcome since I got slapped down for asking for this feature a few years ago. The answer then was that MW blocked this sort of thing on safety grounds.

I guess things have changed.

[anniebrion]

We beta testers get new beta version quite often, sometimes 3 times a week. I'm not sure how often an new release version will be issued as there has been less than a week since v1.0.1 came out.

The feature list has increase a lot just over the past month, so development is going at quite a pace.

I think that a new version will arrive well before your first year is up.

[QuietOne]

I'd bank on several updates Annie.

[michaelkenward]

I think that a new version will arrive well before your first year is up.

It had better.

I would like to have a version of MW2010 that adds significantly to what I had in the previous version.

Something with large gaps hardly qualifies as an update if the major "improvement" is just a snazzy new interface.

[anniebrion]

I think that a new version will arrive well before your first year is up.

It had better.

I would like to have a version of MW2010 that adds significantly to what I had in the previous version.

Something with large gaps hardly qualifies as an update if the major "improvement" is just a snazzy new interface.

I think the new Bayesian engine is more than just a snazzy new interface, this is a vast improvement over WMP6.

We (the beta testers) did point out a few of the missing features prior to the public release but FT needed to release more than they needed to add the missing features.

I think if you are patient you'll see that FT are on the case.

[MrBill]

I think that a new version will arrive well before your first year is up.

It had better.

I would like to have a version of MW2010 that adds significantly to what I had in the previous version.

Something with large gaps hardly qualifies as an update if the major "improvement" is just a snazzy new interface.

Part of the problem FT faced was that their beta team is too techie/geek, and they needed feedback from a more representative community. The effort required to rewrite a package from scratch that had evolved over several years was, as is usually the case, larger than expected, and FT is not a big company with deep pockets. There was probably a certain amount of wishful thinking involved in the expectation that users would be pleased with the underlying technical improvements and that they would understand the need for ongoing revenue to underwrite an ongoing development effort. Many users probably don't use features like reporting and statistics, and frankly, selectable sounds for notification, while nice to have, seems pretty trivial to me compared to the vast improvement in detection accuracy that I see in the new version. I'm sure they wish, in retrospect, that they had taken an extra couple of days to add and test that feature.

[rusticdog]

The plan in at this point to have a public release ready by the end of the week. The two main 'features' would be a simple custom sound option, and a means to getting rid of the Jean-Pierre graphic in the Preview Pane, + bug fixes.

Usually you wouldn't expect to see another release so soon, but given the sentiment regarding the sound we felt it was worth pushing. Also two bugs in particular were quite nasty, one will prevent accounts from being checked, the other causes MW to fall over on emails formatted a certain way.