Well after a long long wait - almost a month after Beta testing finished - I've finished FixPack 3 and uploaded it to the WebSoftware website.
This new release is quite a milestone, it brought massive - truely massive - changes to the core of the editor, which resulted in many changes and lots of testing to ensure nothing breaks (especially plugins). One major area i've tried to address is startup times. Compared to pre-FixPack 3 (Download FixPack 2 for a benchmark) the startup times should atleast be half of what it used to be or sometimes even less. The initial loading of the new version straight after installation will always be slower than subsequent times - it builds the GUI for the first time and creates default caches etc which does take time, but I'm happy to say that on some machines - Centrino P4M 755/1GB RAM -> 1.0 Second or less (Notebook) for instance - the load times are so fast its insane!
While working on this release I remember back when HotHTML 2000 was the 'thang' I actually made the splashscreen forcefully stay atleast 2 seconds before showing the editor because it loaded too quickly. My how those days have changed.
Download a copy of the final FixPack 3 release and enjoy!
Looking ahead to FixPack 4
I've been doing some extensive work since FixPack 2 back in November 2004 about allowing Mozilla and IE web controls to be loaded in the IDE and I'm finally starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel to get this supported. Basically using IE as a means to show a preview is great, but having that optional Mozilla preview will be beneficial for everyone. Using a slightly modified Mozilla ActiveX control i've got this to work on private builds of HotHTML 3, so its something that will appearing in FP4.
Thats it for today, tomorrow's ANZAC day here so I'm going to take the day off and relax a little. Atleast this weekend wasnt as crap as the last:-)