Pre-Alpha 5 Update

Back when we released alpha 3, I had this to say about our development process:

…our plan moving forward is to push out more feature focused releases on a faster timeframe. Having more bite size releases rather than cooking up a whole meal for each release should help us get specific testing and feedback on these features from our alpha users faster, and should make the releases easier for us to manage.

As you might expect, alpha 5 is (instead of an incremental feature release) a massive rewrite of major parts of the system. Sure, we’re adding a bunch of new features, but we’ve also made some fundamental changes.

Some of these changes are part of our initial plans to helps scalability, some are streamlining the code for easier maintenence, and some are due to things we’ve learned about browser JavaScript performance.

We are planning to push Alpha 5 to the alpha servers soon - it’s almost ready! We’re quite excited about the new features we are rolling out over the next few releases, and quite optimistic about our scalability plans. Right now, it looks like we’ll have another handful of alpha releases where we make a few more major changes/additions, then we’ll be working towards our beta release.