02 September 2000 Hello all,
Some bad news... BeAIM 1.2, obviously, is not yet done... and now it will have to be delayed for several months. I know this news will greatly annoy a whole lot of you, but there's nothing more I can do at this point. Early tomorrow morning, I'll be jumping on a plane to spend a semester in Europe, so work on BeAIM will basically stop for a while.
Let me clear this up right now: BeAIM is not dead. I fully intend to start work again when I get back from my trip, sometime in mid-December.
Some background... I had planned great things for BeAIM to happen this summer, but I had no idea how crazy things would turn out to be. My job, my work on BeBits, and some other things in my life took up much more time than I had expected they would. Also, when I did find time to work on BeAIM, the coding went far slower than I had expected and hoped. There was some bad planning and time estimations on my part, and I apologize for that, especially to any of you were really relying on having the next version of BeAIM to work or play with.
Here's what happens now... I'm sorry, but I just don't feel that BeAIM 1.2 is far enough along yet to release in any form. There's just too much critical code that's buggy and/or incomplete. So, as much as I hate to leave you with just BeAIM 1.0, that's what I'll have to do. There's very little chance that I'll be doing any work while I'm in Europe... I'll have access to a BeOS machine, but coding is probably the *last* thing I'll be wanting to do there! This is really my first chance to go anywhere special (and quite possibly my last chance for a while!)
The BeAIM 1.0 source code is, and has been, available for some time. If some of you want to make changes, additions, or fixes, feel free to do so... send me the source and/or binaries and I'll post them here... and when I get back, I'll quite probably merge them into the source tree. A request for developers: please don't fracture BeAIM into new projects! As I said, I'll post any new stuff you come up with while I can't work on BeAIM, but I would like to see it stay whole in the long run, so please keep that in mind!
As a side note for BONE beta testers (and for everybody else if BONE gets released before I get back): BeAIM 1.0 does *not* work with BONE. If you are running BONE, please download this BONE-enabled version of BeAIM 1.0. It's pretty badly hacked, and doesn't work with the current net_server, but it will work in the meantime. BeAIM 1.2 has much better and cleaner network code that works with both BeOS network implementations.
That's all for now, I guess. Once again, I'm terribly sorry to have to leave everybody hanging like this. I wish everybody the best during the next few months, and thanks for your support!
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