Just wanted to update those not using twitter.
If you are not following us on twitter, you can simply save our twitter link and check it on a regular basis, because from now on our twitter account will be the main source of new info on our products: https://twitter.com/blumentals
We are working on WeBuilder/Rapid PHP/HTMLPad/Rapid CSS 2014 which is to come in the first half of 2013.
Why so late? What happened? Why did we stuck?
Product was build using Delphi 7 - really old development environment. Software compiled with Delphi 7 has various problems on modern Windows versions, so we had to switch to more modern development environment. We decided to port the product to a newer version of Delphi, the problem, however, was that newer versions had made big changes to the programming language (all strings became unicode strings and a lot of string processing operations changed). So the challenges of moving code from the ancient Delphi 7 to more modern Delphi 2010 turned out to take more time than we anticipated. The good news is that in the future we will be able to easily move to even more modern Delphi (and hence have 64-bit support and other great opportunities), because after the big move to unicode, the programming language we use (Object Pascal for Delphi) is no more to changed radically.
The porting was done this year, because before that I simply did not have enough help, but since January, Aivars has joined the team and become part of the business. Basically we have spend over 7 months just to port the code. If we factor in other external challenges, basically we have invested a whole year just to make the code better and easier to maintain in the future (that excludes any fixes or features). Now everything seems more or less stable, so we are adding new features and fixing problems for a while now.
What happens now?
We are adding new features and fixing problems. So if you suggested a feature in like 2009 and it was never implemented, chances are, it will be now, also this is a good time to ping us with new and old suggestions. I am ashamed that a lot of parts of the software are just too slow, so we will be fixing these. Also a lot of things are obsolete and not modern - these will be updated.
What features will come?
Cannot say yet, if you follow us on Twitter, you will catch a glimpse of some of the new developments. Currently there are over 100 items to do, we will try to add as many as we can and balance between the number of new features and release date. One thing I can say, this will be the biggest update ever and product will become faster, so no worries about it becoming big and overloaded with useless stuff.