Question

I notice a bunch of little things look different. What gives?

Answer 1

Probably! We've been aiming for a new release every week or so, and with each release, we try to incorporate lots of your suggestions and fix lots of your bugs, so if suddenly that one feature you asked for shows up, it's probably because you wanted it. We also tend to let in more new users with each beta. Here's what we've updated so far:

February 6th

• 1.0 release candidate of both Kiln and FogBugz On Demand deployed.

January 14th - end of February

• Yup, Kiln has been updated! As we near the end of release, we'll continue incremental updates that address small bugs, performance issues, etc. If we drop anything sizable (we probably won't), we'll be sure to make a note of it here.

January 12th Whew! On our way!

• Your account is now available at http://{your}.kilnhg.com! No more your.fogbugz.com/Kiln URLs (although those old ones will still work, so you don't have to go re-clone your repositories or anything). Your FogBugz On Demand account now comes with a pretty Kiln On Demand account and you get both your.fogbugz.com and your.kilnhg.com, free of charge!
• Well, kind of free of charge. You may also notice that the "Your On Demand Account" page, the Users page, and a couple other interfaces have switched from using the FogBugz chrome to a more generic Fog Creek Account chrome. This is because we're going to let users pay for FogBugz On Demand on its own, Kiln On Demand on its own, or a bundle of the two at a 40% discount.
• Of course, both FogBugz On Demand and Kiln On Demand are still free during the entire beta, any trial period...and for all Student & Startup accounts.
• More bug and performance fixes have gone into Kiln in the past month than I'm going to bore you with here, but the majority of our work has been on URLs and the application architecture separation.

December 3rd

• "Resources --> Kiln Client and Tools" now takes you to a page describing the Kiln Client, all of our bundled Mercurial extensions, and a bunch of other information about integrating Kiln and Mercurial with your existing dev tools. From this page you can download everything in the form of our Kiln Client or piecemeal by choosing your desired extensions.
• Very large changesets can be reviewed without difficulty. We truncate extremely large diffs and let the user page in more information as needed (this was causing problems for new Kiln users who imported their entire codebases as a single changeset...and then wanted to review their work).
• Adding a new changeset to an existing review brings up a slick gmail-style notification.
• When a new changeset is added to an existing review, Kiln adds a comment to the review describing what exactly was added.
• Improved the experience for users wondering "I'm done reviewing this code. Now what do I do?" by touching up the "resolve this review" interface.
• You can now subscribe to a code review (just like a FogBugz case) directly from the Kiln review interface.
• Improved the UI for adding a comment to a piece of code in a code review. Just select some text and start typing -- we'll immediately link your new comment to the selected code.
• Helpful explanations for new Kiln users who get started with less-than-administrator privileges.
• "You have a new code review!" emails no longer force you through FogBugz. They now link directly to the code review.
• Kiln keyboard shortcuts are now working.
• Bunch of improvements to the "link this changeset to this case" interface.
• IE performance improvements.
• Bug fixes galore.

November 19th ...it's a big one:

• Repository URLs have been improved! Follow the original thread, but most importantly know that your repository URLs are now guessable (Kiln/Repo/YourProject/YourGroup/YourRepo), and there's no more confusion about that one weird number and how it affects the rest of the URL.
• You can now link a changeset with a FogBugz case, even if you forgot to use the "case:123" syntax in your checkin! Just view the checkin in Kiln and click the little "Add Case" link in the upper right to associate a case. You can use this to add changesets to reviews, add links to this changeset from your FogBugz case, etc.
• When viewing a code review, we'll show you updates as they come in, gmail-style. No more reloading the page to see what your co-reviewer is saying.
• Subversion import fixes
• The UI for resolving a review is much improved
• Kiln and FogBugz's FB_ScratchOut plugin now play nice
• Significant browser performance improvements when viewing large diffs and changesets
• Improved ability to push very large repositories
• Deleting a repository now properly removes FogBugz case->checkin links
• About a million (we counted) other bug fixes

November 6th

• Lots of bug fixes for the ever-improving Importer
• UI overhaul for the Empty Repository page to help new users
• Code review's comment box now grows as you type, just like FogBugz
• Massively improved ability to push Very Large Repositories
• Much more

November 2nd

• Tons of Importer-related bug fixes and UI improvements
• Improved some browser-related UI deficiencies ;)
• Added "Annotate" view's little per-line dropdown arrow to each file's "Contents" view. Now you can quickly view which changesets last touched a particular line whenever browsing a file's contents.
• More responsive UI behavior when clicking on a file's link in any changeset's T.O.C.
• Fixed a few rare bugs causing users to experience strange behavior (such as duplicate projects) during account activation

October 28th

• Added an "Import your existing Subversion/Git/Mercurial repository (or even a plain old directory of files on your local machine) into Kiln" on the Empty Repository page. This'll download Kiln's nice one-step importer that Rock Hymas has been working on. Please try it out and let us know how it goes so we can keep improving your our Super Easy Import Process™.
• More push performance improvements in order to assist Very Large Pushes
• Quite a few UI improvements and bug fixes thanks to your feedback
• Added the cornerstone of what will become the Kiln API, although we won't be fleshing out a full API until we at least get 1.0 out the door. This does have an immediate effect on those of you who are using Stefan's Offsite Backups script or the "get a list of repositories" API that he mentions. You'll now need to supply a valid FogBugz token to the end of your request in the form of {url}&token={valid FogBugz API token}.

October 20th

• Fixed display of commit messages with unicode characters

October 19th

• Even bigger push performance and architecture improvements as we've greatly improved your ability to make Very Large Pushes
• Quite a few patches to resolve problems handling non-standard file names
• When code reviewing a single changeset, the changeset's description is added to the review title
• ...and as always, plenty of small bug fixes.

October 15th

• A number of small bug fixes
• The ability to easily exclude all branch repository activity from your activity feed
• A few push performance improvements as we continue to chop away at the problems encountered when making very large pushes

October 7th

• Lots of wording clarifications and clean-ups, such as saying "Closed" instead of "Assigned to CLOSED"
• Closed reviews are now placed at the bottom of the review list
• Pushes of large numbers of changesets is dramatically improved
• When browsing files, the permissions column has been replaced by last-modified timestamps that link to the revision in which the file was modified
• We now support comma-separated lists of bug IDs in changesets
• The Outgoing tab of a repository now contains an explanation if there are no outgoing changes, rather than being blank
• Some bugs involving highlighting anchors in code review have been fixed
• When viewing a review in FogBugz, comments that have code anchors contain links to the anchors
• All use of revids have been purged from the application, so any revision numbers you see when browsing a repository are ones you can use in your own clone of that repository
• Kiln tools have been rev'd to be based on TortoiseHg 0.8.2, and use a better authentication configuration for talking to Kiln
• ...and lots more

Answer 2

We're also letting a fresh batch of users into the Kiln beta as of this moment -- hopefully we'll find plenty of new improvements and the early beta users can share their knowledge...

Answer 3

...we did it again (Monday Oct 19). I know, annoying, right?

This time:

• Even bigger push performance and architecture improvements as we've greatly improved your ability to make Very Large Pushes
• Quite a few patches to resolve problems handling non-standard file names
• When code reviewing a single changeset, the changeset's description is added to the review title
• ...and as always, plenty of small bug fixes.

As we increase stability we're letting in more and more beta users.

Answer 4

...and we pushed again (Thursday Oct 15)! This push includes:

• A number of small bug fixes
• The ability to easily exclude all branch repository activity from your activity feed
• A few push performance improvements as we continue to chop away at the problems encountered when making very large pushes

We're also letting in yet another new batch of beta users.