0.52 - A version of the friendship
BSG had been frequently released within short periods (about 10 days). Recently when its core functions become much more stable, we expanded the period over 3 weeks, except for having serious bugs. With that expansion, we have more time to think, implement, test, and enjoy life
However, this version (0.52) is an exception when its period is under a week without any serious bug report. It has implemented some recent feedback, functions requests, especially for the previous week. We name it as a friendship version - a gift to all friends. It is evidence we want to show that we listen to you all and try to fulfill your requests when we could. We don’t ignore, don’t want anyone to be upset, frustrated just because BSG is missing some functions or features they need!
On the one hand, we always listen to you all and write down carefully all feedback, suggestions, ideas. However, on another hand, it is impossible to implement everything and/or at a time. Instead, we frequently review them carefully and select some things to implement each time based on our selection category such as priorities (bug fixes typically have the highest priorities), usefulness, difficulties, the readiness of other support functions, workload, being pondered enough… Some ideas are still in our (very long) to-do list for such a long time when other ideas may be in and out (implemented) for short periods. We know some people for some reason, want their ideas, feature requests to be implemented sooner. In those cases please remind/discuss with us, otherwise, we may have other plans/ideas to implement first.
Please be aware that so far BSG is still beta, not officially released. Thus it is still the place we all can play, try new ideas even they are totally new and/or crazy. Everything could be changed and changes are in a high frequency. Our development strategy is: implement first, complete and shine later, (by that way, we can get feedback so soon from users). As usual, new features, codes always have a high potential of malfunctioning, especially when we don’t have any testers but rely on users like you all to test and find out the bugs. Thus please accept and be patient with the mess and buggy status of BSG. You may help us to clean the mess, find and fix bugs too.
We really don’t know when BSG will be completed or less messy since we still want to try/error many new ideas. What we want is not another so-so/average chess GUI (there are already some good ones around) but something that is new and interesting. That could be reached soon, say, next few months but even as long as decades. We have been targeting the first official release (version 1.0) but we may keep that development way after that. When BSG is officially released, we will test much more carefully for each main version and allow to download older versions. For now, if you use BSG for some daily tasks, you may need to keep yourself several versions that are stable, useful enough for you.
Please also be aware that even we love to work with BSG, conquer challenges, help other chess enthusiasts,… but we still have multi duties in real life (grow up children, pay all bills, we still frequently visit some hospitals) thus sometimes you may need to wait a bit longer to get help, replies directly from us. We work with BSG for enjoying without pressure and hope you all enjoy it too