I know we haven’t been very regular with updates on nvUltra lately, and Fletcher and I wanted to give you a status report.
Yes, it has taken much longer than initially predicted for a 1.0 release. The 1.0 feature set has grown in ways we didn’t foresee and is now a more complete solution than it would have been, but that’s taken some time. As the feature set grew, we’ve also had to rethink some core components, in some cases completely rewriting them to ensure that future development is smooth and bug-free.
For those not on the beta, recent updates have included back/forward history, saved search improvements, and a lot of refinements.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 has impacted Fletcher’s day job, and thus his development schedule, and he’s had some events in his personal life that have been very important, but also time consuming. And nvUltra doesn’t work without Fletcher, so his schedule affects timing.
We’ve recently elected to do a major reconfiguration of the underpinnings of nvUltra prior to release, a process we started last week and are making rapid progress on. We feel it’s something that would be better to achieve while we’re still in beta and have a large group of testers to help us catch new bugs that will likely come up. The end result will be a significantly faster, smoother experience that I think will be worth waiting for.
We can’t make any promises on timeline at this point, but despite this step back, we’re still closer than we’ve ever been to a shipped product. We hope to continue making rapid progress with the update over the next two weeks. Once the new build reaches rough feature parity with the current version, that will be pushed out to the beta testers to kick the tires and look for issues. If all goes well, at that point we’ll be ready to add the final touches and prepare for release!
Thanks for sticking with us through this very long development process!
