Back from Austin

We're back from a spring trip to Austin, Texas. Spring is a good time to visit Austin -- though I could have done without the tornado watches we endured on our final night in town. We stayed at the Brava House Bed and Breakfast. It's a superb location in a quiet neighborhood just minutes from downtown. The 6th street music scene is a long, but pleasant (1.5 miles) walk. The new marquee Whole Foods market is just a few blocks away, and other eateries are just as convenient. We had a great time exploring Austin, and the surrounding 'Hill Country' area of Texas. Summers there are brutal (all the local admit this to be the case), but this time of year, the weather was perfect.

Austin has Verizon broadband wireless coverage, so it was easy to keep up with e-mail and tech-support issues...

Now it's back to work on the QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 release. I've made the transition internally to using the new 2.1.4 release. I won't be making it public as it is still missing some key features (file delete, directory delete, directory rename, and directory move); but it does have the skeleton of views implemented, and I want to get some mileage on that before the public beta. I want to get file delete implemented before making anything public -- and for that, my current thinking is I'll have a 'technology preview' before the beta. The 'technology preview' will not be feature complete, but it will have the view stuff in place. I'd like to get some user feedback on 'views' sooner rather than later. Will users see it as confusing, or intuitive?

Stricter QVCS forum access

If you want posting access the QVCS support forums (http://qumasoft.ipbhost.com/ ), you'll need to jump through more hoops than in the past (Users who are already forum members won't see any change). For reasons that defy my understanding, QVCS support forums have undergone a sustained spam attack from folks who either want to waste my time (which may be their intent), or have some wild misunderstanding of what kind of message traffic I will allow to appear on a Quma support forum.

If you want to become a forum member, please drop me an e-mail (jimv at qumasoft dot com) as forewarning so I can let your membership application go through. If you are a registered user of any QVCS product, you'll just need to provide your registration ID. If you are not a registered user (why not?), then I'll be happy to let you on the forum if you can persuade me that you are not a bleep bleep spammer.

QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 progress...

I've passed a major milestone on the road to the 2.1 release: I can now create a 'read-only' date-based 'view' that works (there are still a lot of details that remain). This kind of view, the simplest of the new support for 'views' means that you'll be able to use QVCS-Enterprise as a time-machine to see what things looked like at some point in the past... including file renames, file moves, etc. I focused on getting this type of view implemented first because I figured it would be the easiest, and would help me better understand what would need to go into the other types of views that I want to support: a 'label-based' read-only view, and a label-based read-write view.

My current best guess is that I'll be ready for an early beta sometime in mid to late May, with a release in June or July. The beta will be an open beta, so anyone will be able to sample the bits.

As I've gotten further along the 2.1 road, and in response to some support issues, I've begun to think I need to change the name of QVCS-Enterprise. The new name (which may take effect with the 2.1 release) would be QVCS-MP (for multi-platform). Within that QVCS-MP umbrella name, there would be 3 separate products: QVCS-MP, QVCS-MP-Pro, and QVCS-MP-Enterprise. Vanilla QVCS-MP would have the same feature set as today's QVCS-Enterprise, except it would not support IDE integration; QVCS-MP-Pro, would add IDE integration support; QVCS-MP-Enterprise would have the QVCS-MP-Pro feature set and would add support for views. Existing QVCS-Enterprise users would get the QVCS-MP-Pro feature set, and would have to purchase some kind of upgrade to get the 'view' functionality. This is all just speculation at this point.