I’ve had a few people write to me lately of the fact that we didn’t make our goal for a End of Year 2015 final 1.0 release and its true – we didn’t. One of the defining points of Early Access is that our users get to actually affect the development process, focus, and schedule – and that’s exactly what happened here.

The Final release was originally planned for end of 2015 with notes introduced around fall, but we ended up pushing that so we could get a few other things done that needed to be done instead. The truth is its extremely difficult to plan/target brand new releases where you have to write it all from the ground up.

For example, we had no original plans to break Informant up into two apps, but a large and steady stream of feedback altered our plans to do that. That one thing took an extra 4 months of work, but was well worth it (since it allows Quick Entry, sync, and the Informant Today to run at startup and without the main app to run).

Search is another example. Our original plan was to do search per-tab, but after listening to feedback of that idea, we decided to make it more global – but that required re-architecting the fundamental window design we had. This was a 1 month delay in our original plans, but it ended up with a UI redesign that I think also makes the app much more beautiful.

Take just those two things and we are about 5 months behind our original schedule. That’s why our website says Summer 2016 and has for a couple months now. We actually think if we can keep our current pace of progress up we can make 1.0 in the Spring, but we’re allowing for more feedback change delays.

Desktop is our major focus right now and in the past month we’ve added:

  1. Weather
  2. Drag and Drop to calendar and mini-month views
  3. Subtask/Checklist creation
  4. Search

and in the next beta we are adding

  1. Default task alarms
  2. Attendees
  3. and a few more things

We’ve had weekly beta releases and will continue with that. Right now we expect to be done with Release 7 in about 2 weeks and then we start on Release 8, which is the version that brings in Notes.

What about Informant 5 on iOS and Android? Work on Informant 5 is in many ways the same work on Desktop. So finishing Desktop is of prime importance because trying to focus on both just means both will take forever. Informant 5 is not just an update to Informant 4, in any vein of how Informant 3 or 4 were to their previous versions. It is very much a rethink of what Informant is. I won’t provide a public schedule for Informant 5 on any platform, but it will be after Desktop hits 1.0.