The alpha team get to put up with some fairly dodgy software (well not VERY dodgy, it's passed our formal testplan, but it's not the most comphrensive testplan of all time). They help us to get rid of the niggly bugs which previously resulted in several successive versions of the same Beta release, which were a waste of everyone's bandwidth.

When a Beta is considered stable, it will then become public. Of course it's still a Beta so some problems or shortcomings may remain, but at least it's likely to work as advertised.

I guess that 1.01 is almost ready for release now. It will be a bug fix release, sorting out some issues from Consumer 1.0 although one or two tiny new features may creep in. The next major Beta will be 1.1, which will become a Consumer release if all goes well.

Rob