I'm pleased to announce SquawkBox 3 is now feature complete. The Beta 1 build was released to testers today. The last step before release is to fix the remaining open bugs.

Recently I talked about the possibility of "going beta". For the purposes of this project I have arbitrarily defined beta as feature complete, meaning that all that remains are bug fixes. Under that definition I have not gone beta yet since one key feature still remains: Update Weather. The main weather plug-in is done for FS2002 and FS2004, but updating to the closest weather station and locking to the destination airport weather still do not work.

This does not mean however that progress is not continuing apace. I have been working a bit on the update weather feature in the background but in the meantime have been aggressively fixing bugs. The bug list has shrunk in size significantly over the last couple of weeks and that trend will hopefully continue.

I wanted to make sure that everyone understands that "going beta" is indeed arbitrary. There will be no public beta release of SB3, nor will beta see the addition of any significant number of testers. So labelling the build as such has virtually no impact on the release timing of SB3.

Keep your eyes on the bug list for all the latest progress.