Roadmap Friday on a Monday.

MasterList Professional Beta 5 is now out to you, the beta testers, as of tonight. I had planned to get it out this past Friday, but a project for a client needed more time last week than I expected, so it’s Roadmap Friday on a Monday time.

Beta 5 was 1 part bug fixes, 1 part our new forum at www.safariforums.com , one part this blog and all the other parts an incredibly nasty bug that prevented MasterList Professional from even opening on some beta tester’s pc’s. It was the bug from hell, and ate a month of development time.

After many tests, much help from 6 beta testers, countless hours on the internet and more than a little frustration, it turned out to be a slightly non-standard form icon coupled with a slightly bent third party control that caused the whole mess. After four weeks of frustration, it took about four minutes to fix these bugs once I isolated them on a pristine Windows 98 pc.

Which is why my laptop has been lobotomized in the name of bug extermination: every MasterList Professional build that goes out now will have been tested on a fresh Windows 98se PC, a fresh WinXP PC and two “dirty” pcs. Hopefully, that will prevent a repetition of this type of major bug.

What about the Roadmap?

My (very optimistic) plan is to have two more Betas to find and kill the last bugs and build out the last features including a revised way to do checklists and autoscheduling over the next two weeks. Then release and start selling. Rest assured however that I will not release a buggy MasterList Professional, thanks to your bug reports and suggestions.

I hope to have all the other things I besides writing MasterList Professional done right in the same timeframe. To be a successful micro ISV (Independent Software Vendor) I’ve got about 300 other things to do beside code. But they are easier things, and I’ve got a good program for tracking what needs to get done.

I expect that after the first couple of bug-fixing updates, I can start moving in a whole range of features that add to what I want MasterList Professional to be, and what you, the beta testers, are telling me. You’ll find more detail (and even more detail in the weeks to come) at www.safariforums.com, but we’re talking about both a long list of features I’ve had to put on hold until Version 1 is done, out and selling.

Expect to see at our forum (www.safariforums.com) polls where you can let me know which new features you’d like to see as we move forward.