Home Stretch on T2

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

It looks like Apple is getting near the release of Leopard. We'll see if they make the October ship date Steve Jobs promised. My guess is that the will. The beta versions that I have been using for development have improved greatly in the past few weeks.

I have been in crunch mode to get T2 ready to ship as soon as possible after Leopard. I promise that I am at least as restless as you are to see T2 released! I have almost all of the new features implemented including a completely new layout engine that took most of the last year to perfect. There are a number of bugs and performance issues remain to be fixed, but I'm knocking them down one at a time in priority order.

I'm also currently working with Kenichi Yoshida who is creating the toolbar icons for T2. He did a great job on the application icon, and I'm excited to see the toolbar icons that he comes up with! Here is a sketch of some of his toolbar icon concepts so far:

I will roll out the software to a small group of people starting in the days after Leopard is released to the public (my goal is the day it ships). I'll probably start with about 10 people who are on my customer design panel and invite new people each day until I feel that it is stable enough to release to everyone. I'm hoping that the full public release will be ready by the end of November.

I'll post some screenshots over the next month to wet your appetite. I've been holding back as there has been a flurry of new charting competition arriving on the market over the last year, and I didn't want to give away the new ideas until I was almost ready to ship.