Scitools Announcements: April 2008 Archives

Recently we switched our download system so that downloaders are offered the Understand 2.0 beta ahead of Understand 1.4.  This is because we feel that even though not 100% feature complete, the beta is a better tool for what most of our customers use Understand for than 1.4.

That download page change reflects how close we are to taking Understand 2.0 off beta.  Remaining features we want to add before doing that are:

• external editor integration (for instance using EMACS as the source editor)
• external application control of Understand (permitting other apps to launch Understand views/graphs)
• user tools (permitting users to integrate with make, CM and other external system commands)
• poster / n-page printing of graphics

All of these are 2–3 weeks away… so the time is approaching.

Naturally most of our development effort is directed at Understand 2.0, but Understand 1.4 will not be ignored:

• we will continue to release new builds of Understand 1.4 for 4–6 months. These builds will include:
• all parser changes
• crash fixes
• no new features will be added except for parser and things common to 2.0, like the PERL and C APIs
  
• after 4–6 months, we will stop making new builds of 1.4 weekly. However, we can and will make new builds as we encounter and fix critical errors reported by users still depending on it.

Note that all current Understand 1.4 licenses will operate 2.0 as well. If you are under maintenance, enjoy 2.0. If you aren’t, give it a try and see if coming back under maintenance is worth the money. If so, e-mail sales@scitools.com to ask for a maintenance renewal quotation.  As usual, it is an honor system. We hope you understand doing things like 2.0 (and 2.1, 2.2, so forth) takes money and we hope you feel Understand 2.0 and our support efforts are worth the cost.

I hope this plan seems reasonable to you. None of this is cast in stone, so feel free to send concerns, compliments or suggestions  to support@scitools.com.

Regards,

Ken Nelson
President
Scitools

Welcome to our new Blog.

Why have a blog?  We feel, strongly, that an educated customer base is a purchasing customer base – so call it enlightened self interest.  But even more so, we go to great lengths to write our tools and we want our users to know as much as they can about how they work and what they can do.

In keeping with our usual “just the facts” approach, this blog will be relatively void of marketing hype. I bill it inside the company as the “Engineers Blog” – a place where our product developers can give and get information to help make using our tools a better experience for all.

From time to time there may be a marketing thing or two, like when we introduce a new product. But mostly it will be ‘just the facts”.

My initial use of the system (Moveable Type 4.1 hosting and BlogJet posting) has shown posting to be very easy. So I expect in a few weeks we should have all Scitools engineers involved.

Regards,

Ken Nelson
President
Scitools