It’s been too long, so I wanted to post a little status update.
This is a repost from the Stacks discord chat (there are links at the bottom of https://yourhead.com if you want to join). I’m reposting this here to make sure everyone sees it, but if you’d like to chat about this stuff, please come over to the Discord group.
Thanks,
Isaiah
Before I begin, I need to say a big thank you and farewell to Adam from Elixir Graphics. Adam helped me create Stacks 1.0 and has been one of the most consistent and most consistently great contributors to the platform. Many different developers and designers have come and gone out of this little community for many years, but Adam has been here for it all. I will certainly miss him. So I hope everyone will join me in saying thank you to Adam.
I know some of his customers are looking for where to go from here. Obviously none of us can fill Adam’s shoes – but I do think there are some things the rest of us can do to clear a path forward for Foundry users and help guide the next steps. I’ll post more info on this in the coming weeks.
OK, back to the status update…
Stacks Pro continues to make progress behind the scenes. Most of the work has been in building out the theme API and simplifying layouts – all while maintaining compatibility with the past 15+ years of existing Stacks.
Although the API improvements are a ton of work, and there are thousands of new lines of code – API changes can be pretty dull from the user perspective. There’s just not a lot to see, but there is a lot of frustrating bug hunting. So I decided to pause public betas for a bit. But once I’m over this hurdle and the API is a bit more stable, I’ll resume more frequent public betas.
That said, there have been a few nice usability improvements too. I received a ton of great user-feedback and I’ve pulled that back into the Stacks UI. The info sidebar tabs are complete, reorganized, and much easier to use. Layouts can be previewed. And Gary from Doobox even designed a nice new-project window in SwfitUI. Hopefully, with a bit of luck and debugging, I’ll get to share these things with you in a few weeks.
Yes. That is for the beta. If you want to know when the final release will be, I doubt that an accurate timeframe for that can be done right now. I know that the answer is ASAP. You can head over to discord and ask. Maybe you’ll get a different answer.
Here’s the thing. I can’t guarantee that Stacks will continue, so I’ve had to look at other solutions to prepare, just in case. However, my alternate solution works well and I’m now in a position to make it my main solution. In the absence of the last couple of years of any real timeline I’m left between going full in on a mature well working solution or continuing to wait for a possible solution that might or might not work for me. With Foundry now leaving it’s making me think that perhaps it’s a good time to call it a day. It was good while it lasted.
Many of us feel that way. May as well learn to use a different product as a back up incase nothing comes to fruition. Also makes me cautious that even if released what will the support and ongoing development be like going forward?
Well of course you can’t, you aren’t building it. But there is a dev beta out there for us devs to test with, as well as a new public beta promised in the next few weeks.
I’ve got a bunch of stacks in the chamber ready to launch, but rather wait for StacksPro if I can. I’ve released a few already because they are a great help to those who need them, but there are still a ton of devs and we aren’t going anywhere.
Stacks will continue and there is still a large user base behind it.
I posted one hour ago about Stacks pro and the post is now deleted??
and it certainly leaves a sour feeling towards Stacks pro, Isiah’s lack of communication, and I really feel its time SOMEONE involved shares something other than promises!!
If this is the beginning, how will it continue? We all appreciate the amount of work needed to birth an app, however this is about communication isn’t it?