Developer Alpha 2 Released

[David Nolen]

The ShiftSpace team is happy to announce Developer Alpha 2. Again
we’ll be releasing these at 2 week regular intervals. If all goes well
we should arrive at the User Beta a week or two after Developer Alpha
7.

The UI is really shaping up, a very nice image here:
http://groups.google.com/group/ShiftSpace-dev/web/dev-alpha-2.jpg

Get it here: http://cloud.github.com/downloads/ShiftSpace/shiftspace/shiftspace-dev-alpha-2.tar.gz

You do not need to install git to try it out but you still need to
follow the instructions for your platform here:
http://wiki.github.com/ShiftSpace/shiftspace/installation

We’re moving full swing into Developer Alpha 3. There’ll be a steady
stream of UI improvements and styling. Also, we’ve started working on
decentralizing the backend (WOOT!).

We’ve talked to the CouchDB devs and it looks the approach we’re
taking is a good one. I was secretly hoping to get the core of this
work into Developer Alpha 2, but it definitely looks like at least two
more weeks of work. On the upside, the new decentralized backend will
come with a full suite of backend unit tests.

Our design plans for decentralization are evolving here:
http://wiki.github.com/ShiftSpace/shiftspace/couchdb-architecture

The changes in Developer Alpha 2 are listed below. Later when things
are more stable we’ll start listing known new issues as well.

CHANGES:
* Many UI updates. The first tab is now quite close to the design
mockups.
* Project folder reorganization so that directory layout is less
confusing
* Added rounded images support for FireFox
* Removed use of @optional, @required, @customView from our package
system. They didn’t do anything.
* Proxy no longer tries to load non-shift documents
* Fixed Console mask bug that affected Console resizing
* Optimized humanized paging
* Tweaks to Fx.Graph to support the ShiftSpace notifier
* New shifts now appear always centered in the window (core spaces)
* Fixed hover on shifts in the Console
* Notifier should slide out if shift count > 1
* New icons

Shoutouts to ljxia and Jaqi and Joseph Moore for their help on this
release ! :)