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