More on Flux 2.0

A quick update on Flux 2.0. Well, first of all, for those who have asked... it's going pretty good, we've been able to dedicate a lot of time to it, and we're pretty much ahead of schedule at the moment. We've been focusing on a few different areas, almost all of which were suggested by our lovely and remarkably handsome user base...

1) Speed. We all know that Flux 1.0 can get a bit bogged down on a complex site, we're made many efforts in the past to fix this, but our efforts have only got us so far. For Flux 2.0, speed was a number one priority and as of right now, the speed is incomparable to Flux 1.0, to the point that we'll probably downgrade our suggested minimum specs, I've not yet tried Flux 2.0 on a G4, but I'd hazard a guess that it would be pretty useable.

2) Site import. Flux 1.0 was designed to be a ground-up editor, and site import was limited to well-formed XHTML sites, and even then, there was a limit to what Flux 1.0 could import. That's all changed now, and site import is dramatically better, we've been importing loads of sites from places like csszengarden.com, no problem on any of the sites.

3) UI, major changes are to the CSS editing, which has been re-written from the ground up, to not only support much more CSS, but make it easier, quicker, and take up less screen real estate. We've also made a lot of changes to the code editor to make updates much more "live" and snappier to update changes in code to the WYSIWYG view.

Just one last confirmation to those who have asked, Yes! Flux 2.0 will be free for all users! Even if you bought Flux from MacZOT or MacUpdate, or some other deal, it's still a free upgrade! :-)

What's going on at The Escapers...?

Since we released Stuf a few weeks back, we've mostly focused on that, getting out lots of free upgrades and answering questions on our forum. Now that things are beginning to calm down a little, and we can get back to business as normal, we've started to re-apply our focus back to Flux, at least in part.

So, what does this mean for Flux? Well, what it means is that we're working now, not on little updates, but on the biggest change Flux has ever had, both under the hood and in the UI. This new version will be released as Flux 2.0, and improves upon Flux 1 in a host of areas, such as vastly improved site import, huge speed increases, and major changes to palettes and other areas of user interface. We've not put a timeline on this, as we'd hate to miss the date and disappoint all our users, but we hope it's going to be sooner rather than later. The good news for existing users is that this will be a free upgrade for all.

We've got Flux 2.0 working on our machines right now, and so far it's looking great, so much faster on PowerPC machines, as well as Intel powered Macs. Flux 2.0 will be Leopard only, as it incorporates many features of that OS, and maintaining two code bases would be just too much for a small company like ours.

We'll keep you up to date on progress as best we can, and make this the best release of Flux we've ever had.