Edit : version withdrawn because of possible data loss. Beta 2 will soon be available. 

These last months have been very quiet, but you know what it means - he who speaks, doesn't code; he who codes, doesn't speak. More than 200 commits have been performed on Tagaini's repository to pave the way for the 0.9 series, and you are about to give it your first try.

Much of the changes for this first beta are internal, and although you will not notice much change on the interface, please trust me that they are here. The database layer has been completely rewritten and database interaction is now much cleaner, which should get rid of some occasional bugs.

More noticeable, the hierarchical lists system has been completely rewritten following an initial idea by Tracy to use a special type of red-black trees. The result is a total success, since operations on lists are now much faster and their storage much less error-prone. The RBTree implementation heavily uses templates and is generic enough to be able to handle both in-memory and in-database trees, with transactions support for the latter. It has been heavily tested already, and there are test units for it, so it should be safe to use. Be aware that root changing in the GUI does not work yet.

On the GUI side, paging in the results view has been abandonned in favor of on-demand loading of entries. The advantage is that search results are fetched much more quickly and that the interface is simplified. On the other hand it may sometimes make things less smooth on the GUI side, since entries are loaded by the main thread as needed. All this makes a good excuse to write a faster entry loader, or a threaded pre-fetcher.

Another long-awaited feature on the work is support for example sentences of the Tatoeba project, but this is not in this release yet.

So please download, test and report your experience on this version. Be careful as the user database upgrades make it impossible to go back to 0.2.6.2 - so if you use it, I strongly advice you use Program -> Export user data before doing the upgrade and backup the database file, "just in case".

https://launchpad.net/tagaini-jisho/+milestone/0.9.0b1

Source and Windows binaries are available, Mac binaries are on the way and should be there soon.

Also, you won't be without noticing that the website has been lifted up - big thanks to Axel for this. Hopefully we will be able to improve it further and make it better in its role to spread the Tagaini love.

Speaking of love, those of you who have a Flattr account can express it by clicking on the Flattr button in the right sidebar of the site. It still displays a very disgraceful '0' since its introduction some weeks ago.

Hopefully this version will prove stable enough so that the next issue will be about 0.9.0 final. Plenty of things will happen in this series, so please stay tuned and report your experience, wishes and ideas!