One of the benefits of electronic software distribution is that we can regularly provide our customers with new versions of our software.

These new versions may include feature enhancements and/or bug fixes.

This note is to summarize our version definitions.

General
Release

This is what some companies call a "Golden Master". It is a final stable release for a specific feature set. This release is a the most stable version when it comes to having most, if not all, bugs worked out. It may not, however, have all the features desired.

Candidate Version

Customers continually ask us to include new features into our products. We do our best to accommodate these requests. As we do, we introduce new "Candidate" versions (hence the "c" in the version names).

Candidate versions are normally very stable. They may, however, still need some testing to ensure new features work as expected and that no major bugs are present. We strongly depend on users to provide us with feedback when we release a candidate version. Hence we often recommend that users run our candidate software. When programming errors are found in a candidate version, we do our best to fix such errors as soon as we can. Most often in a day or two.

Beta

Generally useable, but still under active development.

Alpha

A preview version that is known to be incomplete.