Hi Chris,
I don’t want to keep hounding you with MonkeyWorks questions that have been resolved with upgrades to 10.6 or the latest MW, but at the same time I’ve been waiting for the official 0.4.4 release to make the switch.
Do you have a sense of when 0.4.4 will be released? Any advice on whether I should switch early?
Thanks,
Nicole
Hi Nicole,
(I forwarded your question to Tender because I’m sure it’s of interest to other users, too.)
The 0.4.4 release should happen very soon. We haven’t pinned down a specific date yet, but my hope is that it’ll go out within the next 3-4 weeks.
Functionally, 0.4.4 will be very similar to the version you’re currently using. You won’t need to modify any existing experiment files, and the applications should appear mostly unchanged. Most of the code changes will be bug fixes and minor enhancements. Also, based on the results of my survey, we’re going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.5; 0.4.4 will run only on 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
Although we had originally planned for 0.4.4 to include some changes to make it easier to implement dynamic stimuli, the current plan is to hold off on those changes until 0.4.5. We decided it’d be better to release 0.4.4 soon, so that folks like you who have been waiting for a new release can make the jump forward.
Chris
Hi Chris,
about release 0.4.4. I noticed that, in the last install Dave sent me,
you guys have replaced everything that was named “MonkeyWorks” with
“MWorks”. I assume that this will be the policy that you will adopt
for 0.4.4.
Just out of curiosity, why such a decision about renaming? It makes
more complicate than necessary to upgrade to a newer version of MW and
to recompile existing plugins (since many paths must be renamed, etc.).
davide
Hi Davide,
The name “MonkeyWorks” was a problem for folks who are using the software with non-monkey research subjects. In particular, I think there was some fear that human research subjects would take offense at the idea of being studied with a package designed for monkeys.
In order to address these concerns, we decided to make the name more generic. “MWorks” seemed like a good choice, since it’s pretty close to “MonkeyWorks” and lets us leave the application names unchanged. Also, the meaning of the “M” is left to the interpretation of each user; “monkey”, “mammal”, and “mind” are all valid possibilities.
Since the name of the package is now “MWorks”, it didn’t make much sense to have file and directory names with “MonkeyWorks” in them, so those names were changed, too. I agree that this is a bit of a pain for users (particularly those who have developed their own plugins), but it needed to happen. Fortunately, it’s a one-time switch, so once you’ve migrated to 0.4.4, you won’t have to worry about the name changing on you again (hopefully ;).
Chris