Matchusian Pwnage

Well, folks, it’s a new year, and we at MDR would like to thank you, the community, for making this one of our best yet. As always, we plan to make 2011 even better.

We have big plans for MDR over the coming year. First off, we’re rapidly applying our final polishes for the big day in June when we finally come out of beta and push out MDR 1.0.RC1. We’ll then eagerly listen to your feedback, apply a few more changes, and hopefully be ready by Fall 2011 to release a stable version and ship it off to college, where we plan to greatly expand our audience and hopefully get a better feel for the 2012 release should look like. It’s a work in progress, after all, and we hope to be able to continue improving MDR for a long time to come :)

The 1.0.beta.12 release has some really neat features and polishes that we know y’all have been waiting for:

• Redesign—increased confidence: MDR is now significantly more aware of its strengths. Whereas it has been able to effectively serve as a leader unit and perform well in social networking situations for quite some time now, beta.12 streamlines these processes, making them more prominent in MDR’s front-end interface.
• Performance boost: The beta.10 release was, as benchmarks show, actually a step backwards in cumulative performance. Part of this was simply due to a lesser demand on MDR during the beta.10 cycle: there were fewer jobs to be performed, so less work was done as a result. When beta.11 came around, however, we were forced to invest significant resources in optimizing MDR’s workflows in prioritizing and performing key tasks, and we feel we did well. In recent weeks, however, MDR’s workload increased yet again, due to our future college market wanting to become more familiar with MDR and its capabilities by adding a significant number of jobs to the queue. MDR performed well, as always, but this December crunch helped demonstrate some key points for improvement. One of our new solutions, the Strict Pomodoro, has been released to the public. We hope that other organizations will be able to incorporate our work into their projects, as well.
• Geocaching support: MDR now has native support for looking up geocaches on Geocaching.com, transporting itself to those coordinates, and locating the cache. This rather specific feature is more for fun than anything else (we built this one in our free time), but we feel that it helps boost MDR’s social networking capabilities and makes the MDR experience more pleasant overall.
• And more! Obviously, this list is not exhaustive, as this release was a year in the making, but these are some of the most notable improvements that we seem to be able to recall. Anything we missed?

Thanks again for being a fantastic community. We had a blast putting together this release, and hope to be able to continue to serve you in the coming year. Happy 2011, all!