Happy New Year - Alice 3.0 Info?

It's 2009 and I was wondering about the progress on Alice 3.0... Is is at the Beta yet? Or still at Alpha?

And if so would the release of it be later 2009, or earlier 2012?

Happy New Year!

A month ago Gabe said on the Alice developer's blog (http://blog.alice.org/?p=7#comments ) that the target public release of Alice 3.0 was still set for "before the fall semester in 2009" - for both the Windows and the Mac versions. No word on whether on not this will be a beta release.

My school was selected to pilot Alice 3.0 this Spring semester. I'm going to CMU next week, but have heard very few details yet about 3.0, other than that I will be teaching it in three of my Intro to Programming classes. They'll probably also tell me what I can and can't say publicly about 3.0 during the piloting process.

Originally Posted by RichSkyline

My school was selected to pilot Alice 3.0 this Spring semester. I'm going to CMU next week, but have heard very few details yet about 3.0, other than that I will be teaching it in three of my Intro to Programming classes. They'll probably also tell me what I can and can't say publicly about 3.0 during the piloting process.

Congratulations!!!!

Originally Posted by lanceA

Congratulations!!!!

Thanks.

[Note: I have not cleared any of this with the Alice team. As open as they are, they are a little reluctant to say too much at this time about 3.0, as things are changing very rapidly. I did tell Wanda that I wanted to pass on some of the exciting news to the community, though, and assured her that I would make sure to point out that this is simply my impression at this time. Their motivations with Alice put students and children first and I think people will continue to be impressed with Alice for a long time. Just my view.... ]


Alice is in beta form right now. There was quite a large group of possible beta testers at CMU for the Jan 5,6 workshop. My impression was that the core team is really doing a good job in making 3.0 into "what 2.0 should have been." Because of this, it is still very much in beta form. Many of the features of the 2.x interface simply have not been implemented yet. This is not a "tweaking" of 2.0 (for that, see version 2.2). This version will have features 2.x did not have, and vice versa.

Obviously it will still be Alice, and people will (I believe) adapt easily. Some of the new features, also, are quite exciting. Of course the Sims2 models get most of the attention, but for me there was something even more impressive: Alice is open source to begin with, and we all know it's Java at the core, but students really don't see the Alice code in a text editor. That will change in 3.0, and the implications are huge for teachers of AP Computer Science.

I probably shouldn't be giving so many details, but it was really cool to see Wanda Dann 1) open an Alice project in Sun's NetBeans IDE, 2) edit the code in the text editor, and 3) run the scene directly from NetBeans.

Alice 3.0 will be OOP done the right way. These are not huge changes from 2.x, but they should make all the OOP fanatics very happy.

As usual the Alice team members that gave the workshop were super nice and willing to share their thoughts, motivations and frustrations. I hope the Alice community only gets stronger in time, as they are doing so many things the right way, IMO.

A NetBeans demo is also posted on the developers blog and is worth a look.

Will 3.0 have a Help file? Maybe at least an API?

[MrMoke]

For some obtuse reason I got the impression that Alice 3.0 would be developed as a Plug-in for Eclipse, so I installed Eclipse and have been using it for all classes and projects.
I'm scheduled to attend the Corpus conference this summer, and am wondering whether I should migrate all of my workstations, projects, etc. to NetBeans. I really can't do it to my students in mid-year, too much work.