DigiLabs Pro Blog

Hi everyone, I’m Dale the new Digilabs Pro tech support person. Don’t worry, Tim is still around, but I will be joining the team to help support you and your business.

I’m really excited to become a member of the Digilabs Pro team since everyone from the top down is taking the time to show me the ropes. While I have a lot to learn I have a bit of experience in bookbinding, wedding photography, graphic design, inventory control, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Mac tech support.  (Yes, I worked at Apple for many years – we will be focusing a bit more on you mac users!)  Off the clock I’m taking a nine month web design crash course (HTML, CSS, Flash, etc.) at a local college and enjoy doing animation.  Here is one of my original self portraits.

Tim is still handling a majority of the tech support questions right now and, until I’m up to speed, I’ll be spending most of my time in my new spacious office (actually the old Digilabs basement darkroom) proofing coffee table books, albums, and cards before they get printed. My job’s pretty simple.  Just make sure that you get the best products and have the support you need to make your business successful.

Since the big news here is the release of our Beta DigiLabs Pro software, I was asked to write a little about what the terms “Beta”, “Beta Testing”, and “Public Beta” mean.

Creating a software application means going through multiple steps to design, write, test, rewrite, test again and finally publish the software. Briefly the steps are named:

• Pre-Alpha (What are we going to write?)
• Alpha (Hey I wrote this. What do you think of it?)
• Beta (Hey I rewrote this. Tell me what you think of it now.)
• Release Candidate or “Golden Master” (Hey I fixed everything)
• Release to Marketing or “Going Gold” (Hey, lets share it with everybody!)
• General Availability (Hey, here it is!)

I know that those names really mean a lot more but I’m short on blog space. Check out “software development process” at Wikipedia if you want to know more.

Technically this is more of a “release candidate” but to keep it simple, we are calling it beta.   In the end, we are testing every single feature in every single way to make sure it’s fully cooked. The problem with testing is that takes people and it takes time. We are so excited about releasing this new all in one software we can’t stand it. Plus, many of our customers were begging us to try it.  So, we had to make a choice:  Wait and test it slowly or release it to our users as a Public Beta to help us test it faster?

We decided that there’s strength in numbers. It’s worth it to us to let our army of users tell us where we improve because no one’s better at knowing your workflow than you. If you want to help out you can find the Beta DigiLabs Pro software at:

http://www.digilabspro.com/downloads/

Now if this whole idea of trying a beta is new to you then I better give you a heads up. A beta version may still have issues that we haven’t fixed yet. It may not be a good idea to use this new software if you have a deadline you absolutely must meet. Bug bites (bytes?) can be nasty. That’s why we still have our current software available for download at the bottom of the page at:

http://www.digilabspro.com/downloads/

Well, that’s it for now. I think my next post is going to be about laying out books in Photoshop. If you have any ideas, add them as a comment to this thread.