The Upcoming 1.0 Release – What’s In A Number?

Many people have asked us “how come your product is not numbered 1.0 or greater?”. Or “does the fact that its not numbered 1.0 or greater mean that it’s buggy?”. The answer is that the early 0.x releases just indicate a subset of our initial planned functionality. Certainly there are issues with the software outstanding. But the numbering scheme just means successive monthly releases until we get to our initially envisioned functionality. We’re fairly transparent with our featureset and we expect that the early features will be quite useful to a number of people.

That said, what does it take to bump the numbering schema to 1.0 and what is in the 1.0 release? We anticipate the following three major items for our 1.0 release:

• support for Android – we did this last because there aren’t a lot of Android devices in the enterprise right now. But its still very important to us, and work is underway on it right now (as those of you who watch our Github checkins can tell)
• robust device capabilities – we have GPS and PIM contact integration today. We don’t think that is enough to demonstrate the range of capabilities that are interesting. We will be adding support for camera and SMS in 1.0
• third party applications – we have several developers who are using Rhodes who we anticipate releasing before our 1.0 release. We have no idea whether they will be “published on the iPhone AppStore” because AppStore approval takes an indeterminate amount of time. But the apps should be publicly available on other platforms by then.

We are planning 1.0 for the end of February. We will have one point release, 0.3, ahead of then with several requested features before then. Stay tuned to our Documentation page for more details as 1.0 approaches.