Good news everyone! Today we are lunching the first beta version. After many months of work, we finally have a testing version. Usually we wanted to have only one beta version,but after at a better thinking we decided to split it in many beta releases. The release time between betas is 2 weeks, so keep an eye on this blog for future information.
About beta 1
Beta 1 comes with a lot of major changes from the previous alpha version. One of the major changes is on the server-side where we switch for a multi-threaded multi-process approach to a asynchronous event-driven approach. This solution is much faster in most cases and is by far less resource hungry.
Another thing that we do is rewriting the embedded chat-widget. It has a new look and is more modular. It was designed so you can personalize it the way you want, and communicate with the widget using an API. The bad news is that you have to wait for the beta 2 version if you want to get your hands dirty with the API.
I’ll write more about how the new API will look in a few days. (by that time we’ll probably have comments enabled).
Here are some pics with the look of the new widget.
Chat-box closed
Chat-box open
Options menu
Changing name
For those of you who’ve tested the alpha version(and we thank you for that) you’ll need to update your code to enable this widget. To do this you need to login , go to Chatboard -> Widgets -> Embedded code.
Also this version brings a lot of bug-fixes and speed improvements. One major bug fix was when you’re talking from yahoo messenger using a different color, font your visitors will see besides the text some extra funky characters.
Future releases
Like we said in the beginning of this post , the next release will be in 2 weeks , so expect a beta 2 release to be available around October 1.
For the future release we plan to introduce a smaller chat-widget script size(kb) to reduce the loading time. The first version of the API for chat-widgets will also make it’s way to the surface.
We also want to setup a bug trucking system, so we can improve the fixing bugs speed.
So that’s it about this new release. Test it. Tell us what you like , what you don’t like, what you want to be done different.
