Testers wanted for CashBook and PrintPDF

Steve Fryatt, the developer of CashBook and PrintPDF, amongst other things, has put out a plea for testers of new versions of those two applications. He reports that he has been doing a notable amount of work on the two of late, but while there are a few user facing changes, much more of the work has been under the bonnet, restructuring the source code so that it’s easier to work with – work that benefits users only in an abstract way, in that it makes further development of the software that much easier.

While he has tested the software himself (and is likely to be using the latest builds on his own systems), Steve recognises that there is little incentive to users in general to use these versions, since there is little perceived benefit for them to upgrade, and that this in turn means he is unlikely to receive feedback on the changes he has made – the upshot of this situation is that they aren’t getting the level of real world testing that he would like.

With this in mind, he has decided to make available ‘test’ builds of the two applications, for users to try – keeping in mind his warning that:

they have not been thoroughly tested and may well contain bugs, be unstable or have the potential to cause data loss. If you’re not comfortable with that, or don’t fancy providing useful bug reports, you’re probably best off sticking with the stable releases.

That said, the test builds are likely to be the versions of the software that I’m using myself.

He also asks that anyone who does opt to try these test builds send him an email to let him know, so that he has some idea of how widely they are being tested. To try them, visit Steve’s RISC OS Software – Test Builds web page.

Of course, the existence of those test builds doesn’t alter the availability of the current ‘stable’ releases of the two pieces of software.

CashBook, currently at version 1.23, is an accounts package designed to help you keep track of home or club accounts, allowing you to record transactions on a number of accounts, reconcile them against statements, set and monitor budgets, and so on.

PrintPDF is currently at version 0.87, and is a front-end to Ghostscript that allows the very easy production of PDF files on RISC OS computer systems via the printing system – meaning any application that can print can create PDF files.

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