These days the popular thing to do is to release software in Beta status, the Beta being more of a status symbol (and to cover your back in case the software doesn’t work) rather than anything.

Unfortunately, it appears to be making companies sloppy. Beta is one thing, but a lot of this software is more alpha quality. In fact, in some cases I’d argue it’s not even that – it’s blatantly not been tested at all before being released.

The latest of these is Apples Safari 3.0.4. Promising lots of improvements, many, many XP users are finding it constantly crashed when being launched. The Apple forums have a “workaround” which many are finding doesn’t work. And I’m one of them.

In fact, I decided to re-install 3.0.3 and found that too crashed. This time, however, the workaround worked and I’m happily working with that version for the time being.

Let’s see how long it takes Apple to fix the issue….

And here’s another. Netgear released a firmware update for a range of its wireless routers on the 3rd November. It worked in so-far as that it stopped most wireless connections from working. So, well tested, eh?

The Netgear forums were a hive of activity, with lots of users having problems. The workaround, as with the Apple issue, was to roll back to a previous release.

Except that today – 16 days later – the same broken firmware is still on their website for download.

Maybe they don’t read their own forums and don’t know about it? Except I reported it a week ago to their technical team and they advised me it “had been passed to the appropriate department”. Hmmm.

And that’s not even masquerading as a beta release!

What’s going on here?

ConTEXT

Download from… http://www.context.cx

Download size… 1.6Mb
Installation size… 2.7Mb

Like many code editors, ConTEXT has been designed to be pretty non-specific. In fact it’s quite lean – it weighs in quiet light in the Mb front but also in the features. All the usuals are there though, including line numbers, syntax highlighting, etc. The GUI is quite basic, looking like a product 10 years older than it really is.

It has a nice explorer bar at the side for file selection and – importantly – has Project facilities but without forcing you to use them. Nice.

The website is detailed, with FAQs and a forum.

Launching in different browsers can be defined by setting up some user-defined keys. These can also be executed by some icons on the toolbar. 4 are available in total and the set-up is quite powerful (compared to most other editors).

Summary of ConTEXT

A nice clean, if a little old-fashioned looking editor. This could compete to be my editor of choice.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 19th November 2007.