Well, it's the end of Q3…
Judging by the comments in our last weblog entry and the emails we have received recently, it's clear that there is a lot of pent-up demand to get Sandvox released. That's really good to hear. However, here it is the end of Q3 (to translate: the third quarter of the year), and Sandvox has not been released yet.
What's going on?
It's taking a bit longer than we anticipated for a variety of reasons. Part of it may have been the pressure to "go public" at Apple's WWDC so that we could talk about what we were doing with other engineers, combined with probably a bit of overoptimism. Some of it is also due to the data management redesign we did after WWDC, right after we announced the product. Using Apple's Core Data technology has admittedly been a rocky path: it turned out to be a bit bleeding edge for our tastes, but it's the design route we have chosen. (Not to worry, we consciously chose to build on Tiger for a reason: it will pay big dividends for us shortly.)
We are, however, very pleased to say that we have just today released Sandvox in beta form to a select number of users. We have had a lot of people sign up on our web site to get a beta copy, and we will be gradually widening the net to include more and more testers.
We're not going to make specific promises of a release date just yet. Let's get through a round or two of beta testing first. But it will come soon. Thanks for your understanding and patience.