I'm not sure most people will have noticed, and that was intentional, but I quietly moved build 2025 to public release status last night. What that means is that the text on the Vienna web site no longer refer to Vienna being in pre-release status and I've moved a copy of the build into the Released Versions package on SourceForge. The pre-release versions are still there and will stay there. In short, after 9 months of active development, Vienna is officially released.

So why no fanfare? For one thing, I'm still not set up to handle a major influx of users should that ever happen. I'm a one-man band with no support team and a day-time job that pays for the tea and biscuits. Since I don't rely on Vienna to support myself beyond what little I get via the PayPal link, I can afford to allow it to dribble out over time and hope that any of the more egrarious bugs that slipped by can be caught earlier with a smaller user base.

On the other hand, there's value in moving Vienna into release status. Some folks have an aversion to running pre-release software so this simply plays sop with their comfort level. And having a release version provides a cushion while work continues on newer versions. If something breaks in build 2026 or later, the fix is to drop back to 2025 which is a known quantity. And finally, a release status is provenance that an open source and freeware project can achieve closure which can do nothing but hopefully enhance Vienna's status in the eyes of those who see OSS as a twilight of software products that never seem to get to the final gate.

That said, feel free to spread the word that Vienna 2.0 is out there!

(Another key change is that Check for Updates on release builds will not trigger on pre-release builds. Instead you'll need to download the next pre-release build directly and that will trigger on future pre-release builds using a different check site.)

Anyway, I'm off on holiday in a few days and I plan to use the time to relax and start doing some design work on the major 2.1 features. There will be a 2.0.1 update in a month or so with additional localisation that are being worked on as I speak, a fix for the MSN Space HTML redirect that was too late for 2.0 and possibly Universal Binary.

Thanks to everybody who helped to test Vienna 2.0 all these long months and especially those dedicated band of localisers and the folks who contributed custom styles and scripts.