The News at 11

Hey folks,

just wanted to drop a line and explain the recent lack of updates. It’s been a busy time period for me, with a move across town, some family issues, and a host of other things that have conspired to reduce available WM development time. There’s been a variety of issues I’ve been working on behind the scenes, but most of them are related to bug-fixes — in some cases it’s been necessary to revamp some core issues slightly to make “The way things should work” become much simpler.
I’m going to be sending out WM Beta applications to all of those who have emailed me about the beta test within the next week. There is still one more alpha release to go before beta hits, so the official start is still a little bit murky, but at least it’s in sight.

In other news, I upgraded my primary development machine to an Athlon 64 X2 4200 system. Since multicore support is a small but very important upgrade of WM Pro, it’s essential for me to be able to test multiprocessing issues myself. So far I haven’t run into any issues, and on highly parallel workloads (such as Layout/Explorer mode, and Tiled Builds) you can expect an approximate 95-99% performance increase per additional core. This is a real boon in layout mode especially, and makes working with WM much more responsive and detailed.

In the next few years dual core processors will become quite standard, so strong support for them is critical, and I think the new WM codebase fits the bill perfectly there.