You may have guessed it: HoudahSpot 2 is running behind schedule. The original idea was to release HoudahSpot 2 the day Leopard is released. For quite a few good reasons, this idea was dropped quite a while ago. I however hoped until very recently to get a private beta out this week. Didn't happen. I am still at least a week from beta.

The next version of HoudahSpot will be called HoudahSpot 2.0. It surely deserves the name: it is a major upgrade which requires the very latest OS version. It also brings quite a few juicy new features. E.g. QuickLook enabled file previews. Yummy!

It still feels odd to call it a 2.0. For one, it is going to be more like a 1.0 release. HoudahSpot has been rewritten from the ground up. Only select bits of code have found their way back into the 2.0 code base. Thus much of the code is brand new and has not been exercised a lot.

The other "oddity" is that HoudahSpot 2 will drop some existing features. These are features which expect to have a rather small following. Truth is I am just guessing and reading between the lines of support mails. E.g. it seems few people cared about the file browser. Actually I have gotten quite some feedback of people who did not even get it. So now it is gone. I leave file browsing to the Finder.

HoudahSpot 1.5 is available in English, German and French localizations. HoudahGeo on the other hand is available in English only. I hardly ever get requests for localized versions of HoudahGeo. I don't see many French or German customers buy HoudahSpot. You guessed it: the localizations are gone from HoudahSpot 2. Sure, they might return. For now however the focus is on getting HoudahSpot 2 out the door - in English.