Who Wants To Be A Beta-Tester?Who Wants To Be A Beta-Tester?

Me, evidently! This month I've been elbow-deep in the beta-testing of no less than three open source products: Movable Type 4.2, OpenOffice 3, and (of course) Firefox 3. It's no coincidence I use these three applications almost daily, so I have a vested interest in making sure their newest revisions work well. (That doesn't keep me from retaining the existing known-good versions, of course...)

By the time I'd disowned FrontPage, my personal site had swelled to a few hundred pages, something that didn't make sense to manage on a file-by-file basis anymore. I toyed with the idea of something like MediaWiki, but a friend suggested Movable Type 3.2 -- not available as a wholly open source product at the time, but free for personal use. When version 4.0 was released to testers, I dived into the first alpha versions and got my feet wet; when the 4.1, 4.15, and 4.2 open source betas also were released, I got my feet wet and my hands dirty.

Getting involved with the beta process for MT turned out to be more useful than I realized. It wasn't just a case of figuring out whether new features or changes to existing ones would break my site (and in some cases they did), but the mere fact that the whole thing had been released as open source gave me that much more incentive to dig around inside it and learn how it worked.

With OpenOffice 3, my interaction was a lot more limited, if only because a) OpenOffice is a binary app, not a platform-independent product, and b) most of my use for OpenOffice, at least thus far, is as-is. I don't modify or hack it a lot; I just use it, and for that reason it has to run well out of the box. If it bombs, the amount of bug reporting I can do is limited -- not to say I won't do that, but I'm limited by the amount of useful feedback I can give. I will say that I've already ditched Excel and PowerPoint in favor of OO.o's Calc and Impress.

And Firefox ... well, Firefox is close to being a platform unto itself at this point, given how much time I spend with it -- and the fact that it's basically my front end for Movable Type and just about all of my other Web-based work. I've been running FF 3's release candidate side by side with Flock (which only makes me all the more eager for a FF 3-based edition of same), and the beta-testing experience has not been so much about filing bugs as seeing how new features in FF 3 evolved. The evolution of the Places function in FF, for instance, was eye-opening -- at first I dreaded what it would become, but was happy to see the final version keep what worked about the old Bookmarks system and add many genuinely useful new things (like the tagging system, or the ability to restore to an earlier version of my bookmarks by date).

Next up for me is Thunderbird 3 (a/k/a Mozilla Messaging), and the next version of Songbird. If there's an open source app that you're beta-testing right now -- good, bad, or ugly -- sound off about it.