kaiser101: kaiser101: First of all development of Sublime 3 has started over 2 years ago.

Actually, the Sublime Text 3 beta started 4.5 years ago.

kaiser101: kaiser101: People are being given no clue as to whats the roadmap for the beta or the stable release.

That is true. We do not publish roadmaps. Jon never has, and I don’t think we have plans in the near term.

kaiser101: kaiser101: Second read JPS blog post when the last beta was released. It gives a false sense that we are close to a stable release.

I am sorry that you had a specific timeline in mind based on the blog. The last beta was the last one before we graduate out of beta, that hasn’t changed. Some of the work we decided to get done before calling 3.0 done has changed. Since we don’t publish our future development plans, we also don’t publish when our development plans change.

kaiser101: kaiser101: Third read your own post, “we are working on getting 3.0 final ready to launch.”. So vague and ambiguous.

Well, this also ties into us not publishing the details of everything that happens behind the scenes. Most companies don’t operate as open companies where all details of what is going on are published for everyone to see.

Imagine running a software company, dealing with writing the software, maintaining infrastructure for distributing it, accepting payments, dealing with upgrades, updating web materials, designing interfaces, etc. You can probably think of other things also. We are doing those things. Hopefully that helps?

kaiser101: kaiser101: And then people can get a real sense of when it will be ready

As I stated above, I could tell you a date, but if I had, you’d probably have been disappointed a few times already this spring. That is just part of the nature of being such a small company and trying to take the time to do things right.

kaiser101: kaiser101: It would have made a lot of sense if JPS had released a roadmap on what he was targetting as part of release 3 and then ticking off items off that list in the dev/beta release notes.

That supposes that we are all-knowing and have exact insight into what combination of items will make for the best release, before any of the work is being done. The reality of it is that priorities shift on a somewhat regular basis and we change our minds about relative priorities.

I can tell you that when the last beta came out, I didn’t know I’d make nearly as many improvements and changes to the theming engine as I did. Part of this was as I designed and then implemented a new theme, I found various deficiencies that needed to be addressed, and while I was working on those it made sense to fix the majority of theme engine bugs. As we improved the implementation of the sidebar to be more efficient, bugs (and undocumented aspects) of the filesystem notification APIs provided by the operating systems were exposed and we had to find ways to work around those. These sort of follow-on issues seem to happen pretty regularly, and affect the pace at which development happens.