With the recent release of Bespin 0.4 “Stratospheric Stratus” last week and 0.4.1 “Fletch F. Fletch”* on Monday, it’s a good time to post an update on the Bespin roadmap.
0.4.2 “H. E. Pennypacker” – August 26th
Minor release that aims to whack any major bugs reported in the collaboration engine; if we have resources left over, we’ll add support for a subset of native SVN and HG commands to Bespin’s command-line.
0.4.3 “Chuck Finley” – September 7th
Includes a new feature: a “deployment” command. We plan to support SCP (and therefore SFTP and FTP) to start and build up from there.
0.4.4 “Bubba Ho-Tep” – September 14th
Minor release to fix bugs and introduce small enhancements and feature polish.
0.4.5 “Ash Williams” – September 21st
Adds “colorization” to the collaboration engine: the ability to track who has changed what in a file and visualize that in a configurable fashion, probably with foreground or background text color. While this may sound like a minor feature, it actually represents a significant enhancement to our existing functionality.
Also includes “cursor tracking” to show you where collaborators are currently hanging out in the document.
0.5 “Brisco County Jr.” – September 28th
Follows-up with additional social development features, such as:
- “Live file history”: the ability to scrub back and forth along a timeline that corresponds to the history of the file to see what it looked like at any point since its inception. This is vital for collaboration because undo/redo doesn’t undo changes to the document made by your collaborations; using this feature, you can essentially do this by going back in time to revert a change made by someone else.
- “What are my friends doing right now?”
- “What is everyone else in this project doing right now?”
Feedback
Follow along with us on the Bespin mailing list as we update the community if (when?) we deviate from these plans, and please do give us feedback here on this blog or on the mailing list.
* We neglected to update the UI’s codename label in 0.4.1 to Fletch F. Fletch from 0.4’s Stratospheric Stratus.
Roadmap image adapted from Jemimus’ IMG_2699
Ben Galbraith 
Whoa! I love this project 🙂
I’m looking forward to see how you’ll solve the HG support 🙂 I spent some time wondering about UI representation of HG workflow and I’m curious about your approach 🙂
Awesome! I’ll keep using Bespin, and am really excited about this new stuff! Also, I noticed some general ‘wonkiness’ in 0.4.1, so i’m glad there’s a bugfix release. Is there any way we can ‘downgrade’ temporarily the version used at Mozilla? Kind of like how Google App Engine’s versioning system works?
@gandalf: Thanks for the kind words. For short-term HG support will be limited to command-line and perhaps some sugar in the file explorer. Hope to add more VCS UI elements in the future…
@Alex Trujillo: Have you filed bugs about the issues you’ve found in 0.4.1? There are some issues with collaboration which we’re working through, but if you have that turned off, you should be reasonably stable. Check the list of issues we’re targeting for 0.4.2 and see if your issues are on it.
We should make it easy to downgrade to a previous version of Bespin, but we’ve not done that at the moment. 😦
Are there any plans to integrate Textmate-style snippets? That’d be awesome to see. I know Amy Editor is open source and offers textmate bundles. Maybe some collaboration with the developer would be good?
Ryan, you made me smile. I can just see you jnmuipg up and down in the rain waiting for ice cream and then suddenly realizing the absurdity. I’m guessing it made you laugh out loud, too.Isn’t this what helps make life so wonderful – the absurdity and the unpredictability (not a real word, I know). These, at least, are what I love in movies and books.I clicked on the idea of “logic our way into illogical situations”. It recalls (although, in entirely different veins) somethings I find myself doing – “organizing myself into disorganization” or “saving my way into being broke”.
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