Hello Stefan and everybody, I've just downloaded 5.0 for the first time yesterday, so I have a fresh look at how it is different to 4.0 (as that is the version I normally use). I tested 5.0 for a few hours yesterday, and I definitely see some progress. I certainly hope that infrastructural changes will allow for faster development in the future — this is a good direction. Also I hope that architectural changes will make The Bat! less prone to bugs and regressions — this has been a major problem up to date. I hope for a cleaner, less-cluttered and more intuitive interface to appear during 5.x series (I already see some progress in this area too!).
What I want to say is, it seems to me you've taken a good path. Having say the above I must also say this: current state of 5.0 is alpha. There is a number of features not working at all or misbehaving in an obvious way. If you want to make a “release”, which I understand (the “pressure thing you wrote about”) you may consider cutting out the misbehaving features first and then calling a release “an official beta”, a “preview” etc. This will allow you to close, summarize a certain period of work, without sending your audience a false message that 5.0 is actually ready to completely replace 4.x series. As for a list of bugs I absolutely agree with Raymund and Marek! Let me just draw your attention to some of them that are particularly annoying to me: * view modes misbehaving heavily, for example new thread sorting doesn't work at all, * selecting folders for IMAP and making them synchronize is a nightmare — I had to look in three different places: account properties, IMAP folder management and folder properties. What I ended up with is far from perfect: I see the usual folders and a folder [Gmail] below them in which there are all my gmail folders. I'd like to have things in the same way as I have them in Gmail; * there is annoying something appearing every now and then as I hover messages; it looks like a scaled-down message preview, but it is of no use; I'd keep that off by default * view modes are not saved at all This brings me to another point: one particularly nasty recurring issue in TB is not saving or not applying settings (this existed in 4.2 message list tabs; exists now in viewmodes). I mean that you may have two objects set up in the same way (for example two message list tabs) which have exactly the same checkboxes checked etc. but yet they work differently. You may fix these bugs on a more general level by doing two things: creating an abstraction layer for saving/reading settings and switching to a text-based settings storage. This last step would greatly facilitate bugs diagnosis, since also end users could see what's wrong. Regards, KT ________________________________________________________ Current beta is 5.0.0.128 | 'Using TBBETA' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
