naracea 1.1.0 beta

So, where are we with naracea 1.1.0?

The most annoying known bugs? Fixed.

The failing tests? Fixed.

Help update? Finished.

Build scripts? Updated.

So it seems like the v1.1.0 beta can be released. Now, let me type “rake publish_beta” — wait for a while — OK, first beta of 1.1.0 is available now!

Yes, I know, it took way longer than I expected, but I think the wait was worth it. naracea is now much better text editor than it was in v1.0.0, and I’m finally able to switch from “use all available time for development” mode to “fix bugs and do some writing” mode. Which I was looking forward to for couple of weeks now.

You might ask why it took me so long to finish all those changes, because none of them is really that hard to implement and honestly, if I was able to work on naracea fulltime, I think 4 weeks should be more than enough time to finish everything and have the beta available. The problem is the amount of time I’m able to put in this project. Because while I’m really committed to naracea, there are some serious constrains I need to deal with.

First of all, I have a day job which I like, and in last couple of months it started to be pretty intensive, and I’m sometimes so exhausted when I come home that I’m not able to do any serious work on naracea. I really need some time to relax and recharge, I need (and want) to spend time with my family, and I still try to read a book, watch a movie or play a game for a while (which reminds me — Bastion is really awesome) to prevent turning myself into some sort of always-working-zombie.

Second problem is, that I really failed to follow the rule I set on myself when I released 1.0.0: do one thing at the time. I was so eager to implement more things, that I convinced myself that naracea is different, and that there is not a big difference between implementing a feature and delivering a feature. But of course: there are interactions between things, and adding seemingly small change here can lead to more changes somewhere else. Not necessarily because things breaks, but because it is just logical to refactor and improve that other place. And of course, the larger the feature bundle is, the more time I need to spend testing everything works correctly.

So, hopefully, I took the lesson, and next cycle (1.2.0) will be shorter and more focused.

In a mean time, as I see it now, I will spend next 4 to 6 weeks testing naracea thoroughly, and 1.1.0 release should be available sometimes late in January or in early February next year. If you would like to try naracea before the final 1.1.0 release is ready, you can try the beta yourself, because since there is little risk I’ll change something significant during beta period, I decided to make 1.1.0 beta public. So if you are not afraid of working with beta, go to beta download page and try naracea 1.1.0 yourself.

I hope you’ll like it.