A week from the release of SMS 2.5 and I’m already looking at 2.6.  It never ends.  I shared the SMS roadmap with the developer group at Anodyne the other day and people are pretty receptive to the homestretch for the SMS 2.x line.  I’ve decided that 2.7 will be last SMS 2 release before a fairly long development cycle for SMS3.  Lots more information about that after 2.7.  All the attention right now, at least for me, is on 2.6 and what’s being added there.  It’s not Anodyne policy to release a feature list until things are pretty much wrapped up so that we don’t end up failing to develop something and disappoint users.  Much easier to just tell them what was added instead of making promises.  Regardless, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.  What I did want to talk about is going to be really vague, but I wanted to share nonetheless.

The number one feature being added to SMS 2.6 is going to bring the “wow” back to SMS.  What do I mean by that?  When SMS 2 was released last summer, there were people all over going through, looking at the system, and going “wow, that’s really cool” or “holy crap.”  Subsequent releases haven’t had that, though we haven’t been aiming for that either.  For the most part, most of the features we added could be seen coming from miles away.  Sure, a few arrived earlier than expected (private messages anyone?), but you could pretty much guess what was coming.  This time around, I think we have something that’s going to put that excitement about a single feature back into SMS.  Anyone who’s followed SMS development knows that I’ve moved to use codenames to masquerade where the latest SMS toys are hiding on the server.  That hasn’t changed.  However, individual features have always been wrapped into the overarching codename.  For 2.6, the numero uno feature has its own codename: Neptune.  (Don’t bother going in search of a Neptune subdomain, because it doesn’t exist; you’d have to know the 2.6 codename in order to get to Neptune.)

Neptune is something that I’ve wanted to do for about 9 months now but just haven’t had the time or patience to actually sit down and do it.  When the time came to plan out SMS 2.5, I was gung ho about putting Neptune on the list, but after careful consideration, it got dropped after only a few short weeks into development.  Still, I wanted to see this feature in SMS before the end of 2, so I shuffled some things around to get it in to the roadmap.  It found a home in the 2.6 roadmap and I’ve stuck to that.  Now, the original idea for Neptune was far less cool than the current implementation.  I had a brainstorm a few weeks about some things that could be added to Neptune.  One idea led to another and before I knew it, I had a beast on my hands.  As testing wound down on SMS 2.5, I got more and more excited to tackle Neptune, and today was the day.

The initial framework for Neptune is in place.  The next step is to pull in the actual elements that it’ll be interacting with once it lands on the trunk later in development.  Slowly, it’ll be pieced together until finally, it lands in all its glory in a few weeks.  As things get finalized with Neptune, I’m likely to release some information about, but we’ll just have to see how development goes fist.  For those of you trying to figure it out, here’s a hint: you’ll need JavaScript enabled to use Neptune. 

After nearly seven full months of heavy development, SMS 2.5 has gone gold. I finished up the last of the small updates to the system and officially declared the Gold Master. For the next 48 hours, the SMS 2.5 archive will sit on my desktop until it comes time on Tuesday night to upload it to the server. This is a huge milestone for SMS and for me personally. There were definitely days where I didn’t think this release would happen, so having it a mere 48 hours from now is pretty exciting.

I definitely want to recognize the beta team that worked so hard to make this the best possible release that they could. The first beta of SMS 2.5 was in the testers hands on April 9th. Today is Gold Master. That means that for the last 3 and a half months, the beta team has been tirelessly hammering on the system to find as many of the bugs as they could. Is this release perfect? Not by any stretch of the imagination. I have no doubt that 2.5.1 will be coming before long, but the goal is to make the list of things that need to be fixed for that as low as possible. On top of that, given how big of an update 2.5 is, we’re bound to have missed some things, but we’ll move quickly to patch anything that comes up.

Since RC2, a few minor things have been added and some text has been tweaked, but all in all, this is a very exciting day, right up there with the day I declared SMS 2 Gold Master. So let the countdown begin. Only 48 hours now.

One thing that did change with SMS development with 2.5 is that I stopped developing everything on my laptop and instead moved it to our server.  It made more sense and allowed me to work on things even when I didn’t have my laptop with me.  I was nervous about that and specially about people poking around the server and trying to find it, so I decided to use a codename.  For obvious reasons, I didn’t release that codename, but now that things are done with, a new codename’s been selected, so the old one doesn’t matter any more.  For those who are curious, SMS 2.5 was developed under the codename Palantir.

In closing, I wanted to leave you with a few stats about the upcoming 2.5 release.  Enjoy!

• SMS 2.4.4.1 Total Lines of Code: 21,664
• SMS 2.4.4.1 Archive Size: 3.22 MB
• SMS 2.5.0 Total Lines of Code: 32,243
• SMS 2.5.0 Archive Size: 2.6MB

This is precisely the reason why we do a release candidate stage.  The QA team found a few lingering bugs with RC1 over the last 2 weeks, a few of which would’ve been really bad for anyone doing an update.  A couple of hours testing and tweaking and the 2.5 update script works like a charm.  We’re only 13 days out from the release, so the final testing is going on with the goal of declaring SMS 2.5 gold a few days before release.  Things are shaping up nicely for this release and I’m excited to get this into the community’s hands.