Don't get me wrong; I really appreciate when developers take their time to build a good product, instead of simply churning irrelevant new versions just to make the news. But sometimes, the waiting gets too hard for the geek inside you. These six new version of popular apps, gadgets and services I've been anticipating the most:
It's no secret that I'm not happy with my Firefox 2.x's performance, and judging by your comments, many of you feel the same. Firefox has been putting out betas of version 3 for what seems like forever, and now, after 5 betas and a release candidate, we're getting anxious. The good news? It really shouldn't be long now.
It's been almost a year since we've seen the first screenshots of the new version of Delicious, and they've been teasing us with it ever since. I like delicious' simplicity, but there's no question that the current version looks dated; hopefully the new one, which promises better search, sort, filtering and organization of favorites, will be out while we're still young.
Here, by "new version" I mean "a version that won't be down all the time". They've been promising it for a looong time now (there was even talk about a whole new Twitter engine that's not based on Ruby on Rails), and it's about time they delivered.
Popular social news site Digg gets updated every now and then, but the minute changes are almost never what the users have really been waiting for. For example, the last significant update was merely fixing a previous update, the new comment system, which was annoyingly slow. The last update before that was a tweak to the algorithm, while the last significant update, Digg version 3, is now nearly 2 years old. We thought we'd have restaurant reviews by now! Time for a refreshment, don't you think?
First of all, Gmail is still in beta. We know it's the era of perpetual betas, but come on, Gmail has been around for years; hiding behind the beta tag really doesn't make much sense anymore. Secondly, there's always a new version of Gmail in the works, but those new features seem to be coming to us, the end users, so slowly it's driving us mad. Some nine months ago we've made a list of all the features we'd like to see in Gmail, but not many of those have been implemented. So, we wait. And nag.
Oh, just get the damn thing out so we can all stop reading constant unfounded rumors about it. And give us the SDK 2.0 (and all those beautiful new apps) while you're at it, please?
Special mention: Windows. Yes, it's not really a web application, it's an entire friggin' operating system many of us are working on day after day, and the last version, Vista, already seems like a bad memory for many. Microsoft, get your act together and instead of dumbing XP down, gives us something we can use, and do it fast.
So, are you, too, losing sleep about a new version of something while the developers take their sweet time playing miniature office golf? Please share them in the comments!