Oxygene "Nougat" BETA 2 is out!

On Friday, we shipped BETA 2 of Oxygene “Nougat“, the next major platform for our Oxygene language (in case you have missed it or have been living under a rock, Nougat is “Oxygene for Cocoa” and brings your favorite programming language to native Mac and iOS development. You can read more about it here and in my previous blog posts).

Jim also recently spent some time on a great “Oxygene Overview” video that went live today and gives a first peek at Nougat, too.

It’s been about 8 weeks since we shipped BETA 1 (and we shipped updated builds to testers more or less weekly since then), and the team has been really busy and made great progress on all fronts. BETA 1 was a very early look at the product — it was still very rough, the “this is what you need to know to get started” list was way long, and many things did not (by design) work yet. But we wanted to let the early adopters get started, and we’ve gotten great feedback for this first part of the beta cycle.

BETA 2, out now with build .1139, is a lot more robust, should provide a fairly decent “out of the box” experience to get started, and — most importantly — sees most core functionality working decently.

BETA 2 supports running and (still limited) debugging of Mac apps (Cocoa and console) and iOS apps on both the Simulator and actual devices. BETA 2 has fully integrated the deployment toolchain, so that with the press of a single key (F5, a.k.a. “Start”), your app gets compiled, linked, packed up, code signed, and uploaded to your device. The compiler has been vastly improved in BETA 2, with lots of bugs fixed and lots of features and improvements all thru-out; the corresponding IDE experience has improved as well, for example with code completion and related editor smarts fully understanding the new “multi-part” method name syntax, everywhere.

Of course we still have miles and miles to go before we reach RTM. As promised from the get-go, we are shooting for a release of “1.0” (or rather “6.0”, as it may be) in the “first half of 2013”. Now, we strongly plan for that to not mean “on June 30” (we’re not Apple ;), but we are taking our time to get everything right, and we do still have a good 5-6 months ahead of ourselves in terms of getting Nougat to final.

But, we also know that you are anxious to get started, and a lot of you have been holding off jumping into the dangerous waters with BETA 1. But if you are at all adventurous and inclined to live on the edge a bit, BETA 2 (and its continuing semi-weekly updates) is as good a point to get your feet wet as any.

So what are you waiting for? Assuming you have already ordered your copy of Oxygene, head over to beta.remobjects.com to grab your copy of “Nougat” BETA 2 now! Make sure to check out my “Getting Started” post, as well.

(If you don’t have Visual Studio 2012 installed yet, grab the latest Oxygene for .NET or Java installer from here first, and then install the Nougat beta on top (this will upgrade all three editions to the latest bits)).

Also, don’t forget to let us know what you think — leave your comments here, or join the discussion in our private beta forum at connect.remobjects.com/categories/nougat-beta.

Yours,
marc