Omni web

[William Shipley]

Our first public beta is scheduled for November 25, if no disaster befalls us.

I've been working on it 15 hours a day, and I must say I'm pretty happy with the way it's shaping up, although we have a ways to go.

There will be some semi-private alphas before the first public beta: I'm taking volunteers now.

Only volunteer if (a) you want to see the new features and give us feedback on them, (b) you don't mind it crashing occasionally, (c) you don't want to use it to do real work, (c) you really are going to send us feedback, you aren't just going to look at it and say, "huh, cool," (d) you understand that this is a complete rewrite, and as such is currently missing some of the features of 1.0, (e) you can accept multi-megabyte NeXTmail, and (f) you don't need a lot of hand holding, as we have no time for supporting our early su... er, beta-testers.

What we really need is some regression testers; we need people who'll test out 2.0 on pages that worked in 1.0 and make sure it still works.  (We also need people to exercise 2.0's new features, but we're more confident in those.)

Sounds like a crappy deal, doesn't it?  What you get out of it is the ability to influence the design, as on November 25 we're freezing the features, and all we'll be doing is bug testing.

-Wil