Hi, I’m currently using beta RC18 and at a critical point in my project. I’m worried that with only five days to go until expiry of the beta I’m going to end up in a position where I haven’t got the full version yet and the beta stops working. Anybody any thought on whether we’re going to get a seamless transition?
Cheers
Mark
So far there’s always been a new version released before the deadline, so I wouldn’t worry!
We’ve always had smooth transistions through the beta phase. I’ve every confidence that when full v3 release is launched, we’ll not be left behind, abandoned.
I would continue to work in full confidence in the team at Scrivener.
Mark, in many years of experience with this team, I’ve never seen better attention to that nerviness which can come to writers, and they have never failed us.
Particularly on the stream of releases from beginnings of the Scrivener 3 Windows effort, anything to do with basic operation has always gone smoothly…
Rather than suggest you relax, though, why not simply export your project, if timing were to seem too close?
You could compile to MSWord, OpenDoc, or RTF for example, and get a coherent backup with ability to work further on it should need arise.
You could then copy-pasting any changes back into Scrivener, where you have your enhanced tools again, and you’d be able to find them using the change tracking in your other editor, as in Word.
Simplest is safe, imagine you would feel also.
Thanks all. I feel better already!
It’s important to make the distinction between Beta versions and Release Candidates. It’s a bit misleading because of the forum title but Beta versions are generally feature-complete, but with varying degrees of bugs, but we’ve gone through that phase onto Release Candidates now. A Release Candidate is exactly what it says on the tin - a candidate for release. It should be [relatively] bug-free, and fully operational. When the RC has gone through the testing process you either get another Release Candidate, OR the latest RC becomes the first full release. If anything significant has come up then you fix it, and distribute a further Release Candidate - you don’t fix stuff then call it a full release and hope for the best.
I’ve worked in software development for years and this has always been the de-facto standard adopted by pretty much every company.
In short, if we were to get a full release today, it would (or should) be identical to RC18.
While I’ve also got quite a number of years of experience as a software developer, I’ve never had to deal with the situation here, where the software in RC status is attempting to duplicate the software on one platform (Windows) that is already released on another (Mac).
As such, I have to ask the powers that be: “I take it—if this is truly a RC—are we no longer going for (if we ever were) complete parity between the Mac and Windows versions?”
Or, to put it differently, does “fully operational” in this case mean all the features they did choose to include on Windows do work as designed, but not all the features from Mac were brought over (also, by design?)
Specifically, I’ve been dying for Linguistic Focus, particularly as it exists on the Mac.
Oh, sure, being able to view Direct Speech is nice (or it would be—I just discovered that it no longer works for me, so I guess this RC won’t be Version 3 after all), but I’d really like all the other Mac varieties of Linguistic Focus. Greedy, I know.
[size=150]EDIT: Okay, for the second time in two days a problem I reported went away immediately after I reported it.[/size]
I was testing the Linguistic Focus further, and it occurred to me a possible explanation for “the bug” was that the document I was not seeing the expected results from began with dialogue, and the first character in the document was a quotation mark.
So, I added some other (non-dialogue) text before that and it worked. I thought I was onto something, but then when I removed the non-dialogue text, Linguistic Focus still worked. 
One problem I did see (now that it’s working for me) is with my dark mode, the fade seems completely non-functional; all I see is dialogue, none of the other text.
When Mac Scrivener 3 came out of beta, the last beta continued to work until its expiration date. People could install the release version at any point. There was no “gap” when neither a working beta nor a release version was available.
Note that the expiration date is hard-coded into the software. There’s no way for us to extend it even if we wanted to. You’ll definitely need to download something – either the release or the next beta, as the case may be – to continue working.
We don’t expect there to be a gap – and as Narrsd said, have never had one before – but it’s your work. Extra backups are never bad.
Katherine
Beta RC 19 landed in the last few hours. Yay! Unfortunately I get an ‘application error’ failure when running it. Not yay!
In view of the application error and the fact that RC18 seemed to be pretty solid I decided to delete both the RC18 and 1.9 installations. Then I re-installed RC19 from scratch. That worked, just in case anyone else gets this heart-stopping error message!