Cantabile 3 now supports checking for “experimental” builds.
Better Experimental Build Packaging
Cantabile has always had experimental builds. The builds are exactly as they sound — experimental. They usually haven’t been as well tested and may contain urgent fixes or unproven features and ideas.
Experimental builds for Cantabile 2 were a fairly haphazard affair — their build numbers didn’t mean much and they often came straight from my development machine, didn’t go through an official build process and were packaged as zip files that needed to be manually extracted and installed.
For Cantabile 3 I’ve cleaned this up.
Experimental builds are now built using the same build process as for official builds. They have in-sequence build numbers and come packaged in with setup program.
The only difference is the potential instability.
If there’s the potential for an experimental build to modify your files in such a way that they won’t work in previous builds, there will be an appropriate notification to make sure you back up before using the build.
(But you’re already backing up your files regularly anyway… right?)
All Builds Start as Experimental
From now on, all builds will start out as experimental and once I’m satisfied they’re working correctly — probably a couple of days to a week or so — depending on the change — I’ll promote them to stable builds.
This should reduce the risk of a rogue official/stable build.
Separate Downloads
The other thing you’ll notice is that when the latest build is an experimental build the download pages for v3 will include two sets of downloads — one for experimental and one for stable builds. If the latest build is a stable build, there will only be the one set of downloads.
You can download an install either build at any time.
Update Checking for Experimental Builds
Cantabile’s update checking has also been improved so that you can be notified of new experimental builds.
By default you’ll only be notified of new stable builds, but if you like living on the edge and want to try new things as soon as possible, turn on the option “Include Experimental Builds” and enjoy being the first to try out new features.