Life Balance 4.1b2 and 3.5b2 public beta

First, I want to thank everyone who sent us feedback about the previous beta, and to everyone who took part in the recent poll question. We have a new build that addresses most of the issues that popped up during beta 1.

You'll need to be a web site member with an account and to be logged in to download these builds.

Be sure to read the full article, by clicking on the "Read More" link below for all the details before downloading these BETA builds.

What's new:

For Mac and Windows, we've added new Move Up/Down/Left/Right menu items to the Task menu that can be used to rearrange your Outline. On Mac, the keyboard shortcuts for these commands are Control-Command arrow key. On Windows, the shortcuts are Control-Alt arrow key.

For Palm, we've also added "Catch Up," "Skip," and "Defer Until" commands to the Task menu in the To Do List view. These work just like the same commands on Mac and Windows, so check out one of the desktop manuals if you need to know how those commands work.

Here are the changes in the latest beta:

• Palm: Corrected an error in the "Postpone Until..." code where we were failing to add the base year value, which is 1904, when converting the year from the Palm date format.
• Palm: Corrected a fatal error in the "Postpone Until..." code that could happen when creating an exception to a repeating calendar event.
• Mac and Windows: Added code to detect and repair invalid repeat frequencies on a repeating calendar event. This was to help out one particular customer who had a problem in his data. This was not likely to be a common issue.
• Mac: Removed the code that synchronizes the location field in iCal to places in Life Balance, based on poll results and follow up conversations with our customers.
• Mac: Added a timer so that the outline will auto-scroll when dragging a task without having to wiggle the mouse.

There is also some additional debugging code in the Mac version that should help us track down the assertion failures that one customer encountered if they recur.

The same recommendations and caveats apply from last time:

The intention is to have members of our community check these builds out quickly prior to posting them as official releases to everyone, other sites and vendor partners. So, if you are one of our betas, or you feel brave... you can install the latest, AS IS, prior to the final release of these builds, which we expect to be within a week or so if all goes well.

Note that these builds include extra testing code compared to our release builds, so they may be a little larger and slower than you're used to. As always with a beta, we recommend that you make a copy of your Life Balance data file, and if you're on a Mac, your iCal data before installing the beta.

These beta builds are set to expire on 9/1/2008, although we expect to have posted the final builds long before then. Just be sure you come back to get the release builds!

If you find a problem with these builds, we want to know about it right away. If everything is running okay for you, we will want to know that too! :-)