Development and Production

With the new release of the Standard Edition and Lite Edition betas, what does the road ahead look like? Well it's certainly much smoother than it was. The development up till now was pretty much nit-picking over things. I've now committed myself to the release, the files are uploaded, and the installers are available for you to download (registered beta testers, that is).

Now the next release should hopefully be along the release candidate line, and hopefully there will only be two release candidates before the final big release. Timeline? Well that partially depends on the beta testers. I'll be testing myself on the variety of operating systems I have at my disposal, looking for any bugs that may crop up, but my capabilities are still limited. I know I have users from all across the world, so I'm curious as to what kind of potentially language-specific items may crop up.

Note to the beta testers: With the beta testers, when you post a new ticket into the system, make sure you have the proper release selected.

I'll create and post some new screenshots to the image gallery as well. I look forward to the feedback regarding this beta release, and I'll try to do my best to be better about keeping things up to date here. As for the "secret feature", I'll be sending an e-mail to the beta testers describing the feature and how it works.

And as I'm sure you've all frustratingly noticed, there isn't a user manual yet. Don't worry, I'm working on it.

Let it commence...

The second round of beta testing will commence later today when I upload the beta releases - Lite Edition beta 2 and Standard Edition beta 1. That's right, they're finally ready. The version number on each release is 4.0.0.306. I'll post more when the files are uploaded.

More than a month without an update.... I'll bet that if you've been following this blog you're at least curious as to what's up.

On March 23, my employer, the MediNotes Corporation in West Des Moines, Iowa, decided to lay me off. I wasn't the only one to go either. I was a developer there, and another developer along with another member of the company were also laid off, and several open positions are also not being filled. Currently I'm actively seeking employment, and that has been taking up a bit of my time.

Now a little bit of info regarding the development department as it was before I left. It was made up of 11 people: the manager, assistant manager, two team leads, and everyone else. The other developer and I were the two most senior (a.k.a. most expensive) people amongst the "everyone else" category, with the other developer being more senior than me.

Now yesterday I saw a listing for a developer position for MediNotes on a job site. At first I thought that they turned around and added another developer position back to the company, so I inquired about it with the HR manager. Turns out another developer resigned as well, so the company lost three developers in less than a month (don't know when his last day is). He was the next most senior person in the development department below me.

So they've gone from 11 to 8 in a very short amount of time.

If you want an idea as to what's going on at MediNotes, look around their web site. You'll find information about a recent acquisition of another company based in Tampa, Florida. Acquisitions and mergers create chaos and cause companies to want to cut costs, and well, mine was a cost that got cut.

Now beyond that, let's get to the Antares Project.

The biggest holdup on this was trying to figure out how to compile a Unicode executable for x64. It kept errorring out for some reason that I was not able to discern until about two weeks ago. I've got the problem figured out and it's just a matter of finishing up the compile to get the code out the door. I'm sure plenty of you have been waiting patiently for the Standard Edition to hit the site, but you'll have to wait just a little bit longer.

How long? Hopefully not too much longer.