![]() Matrix functions for FileMaker Did you ever wish you have the possibility to use a 2D array as a data structure in FileMaker? If the answer is yes, we have very good news for you, with the MBS FileMaker Plugin 9.2 your wish come true. But for our pr and final releases, we disable that. The only thing a beta version may have new code (not fully tested) and sometimes include debug messages being logged. All versions we upload can be used in production and we do that ourself for client projects. But even more with renewal reminders sent on the first day of a month.įinally all version numbers are arbitrarily chosen. We do a big portion of our sales with new release going out. Two things to note: A lot of customers only purchase if major version number increases, so we do that every year. I suggest you try to approach something similar for your software with either years, half yearly, quarterly or even bi-monthly releases. Now you know how much work a MBS release is. The emails are personalized to display whether the license is current and it's a free update or whether a license key is expired and it may be a paid update. On the following Thursday we send a notice to everyone about the new release. And of course some people order updates for their licenses. A few minutes later some early adapter may have downloaded it, send congratulations or bug reports. On Tuesday we update the website to mention the new release, make blog articles and send emails to the mailing lists, our press list and put it on a few announce websites. Finally we upload new documentation files for Dash application. The upload takes a while as it's over 5 GB per release. ![]() Monday we pack all the files into zip archives and digitally sign disk images. The release notes file is cleaned up, sorted and links are added for the mentioned items. Next we create PDFs and upload the help files. We regenerate the documentation and make sure all new items are included. For FileMaker we run our tool to create the Database Design Reports and than the html for the website. Than we run Arbed for all examples to create html versions. For Xojo we run our application to test build all examples ( See earlier blog post). The checklists are long and include a few points like rebuilding all plugins (Mac 32/64, Win 32/64, Linux 32/64 for Intel and Linux 32 for ARM) with proper code signing. Usually Sunday we start the checklist for the release to be made on Tuesday. We check the new examples whether they work well on all platforms. A week before the release we stop adding new features and just fix bugs. Usually trying to avoid a week with vacation, conferences or working on-site for a client. With some urgent fixes we may make an extra pr to push it out quickly.įor the release month (odd number), we pick a week for release. Sometimes there is an update for DynaPDF. Over the month we add more and publish a new prerelease about every week. People can enjoy the fixes we made and of course see a few first new features. The first prerelease usually comes out beginning of the next months (even number). It's also a great time to start on something new for the next release, which may take several weeks to be finished. There may be a few bug reports coming in and we may provide updated plugins to just the bug reporters to try. Usually there is a week or two where we can relax and enjoy watching people try the new release. The October was quite full with not much office time left. In 2016 for example we visited Xojo Developer Conference, the German FileMaker conference and the Spanish FileMaker Conference. ![]() ![]() ![]() Doing a release in October would be hard to manage due to conferences. the July release is what people get presented at FileMaker DevCon. The individual releases are usually scheduled around conferences, e.g. Followed by releases over the year till November with last one. We have a x.0 release and people notice that something changed. This release increases the major version number. So when the year starts and everyone comes back from holidays, we have a brand new release in mid January. If some change is needed in the plugin to adapt to a new FileMaker or Xojo version, we can react and usually release our plugin update before the end user gets the new version in hands.įor the schedule, years ago, we discovered that the odd months are best. Going by two months means, we are usually quicker to turn around releases than Xojo (3 to 4 months in average), FileMaker Pro (once a year) or FileMaker Cloud (1 to 2 times a year). MBS Plugin Release Schedule For the last three years we have been quite good to meet the bi-monthly release schedule. ![]()
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