Welcome to the Joost developer blog. This is the blog where Joost developers will show off preview releases of upcoming versions of Joost, will talk to you a bit about widgets and sometimes show you a little bit of the behind-the-scenes action at Joost. We're starting today with our first preview release.

A word of warning: preview releases will likely contain serious bugs and may not even work at all. But you will get a first look at new features, and the preview releases may have bug fixes for the current beta release. If you just want to watch great shows, you should use the Beta release. But if you'd like to help us find all the nasty bugs, (which means you’ll see a lot of them), then the preview release is for you.

New preview releases will appear here when we have them. It might be every week, or if we're distracted watching some good shows, then it might not be for a while. We'll always announce them here.

Download preview release 1 for Windows
Download preview release 1 for Mac

Things of note:

• You don’t have to re-enter the user profile every time
• Many bug fixes in the Explore section make it more robust
• There have also been lots of widget enhancements / changes that are not yet well-documented. See the widget area for some simple demo widgets, or ask on the Joost Widget mailing list if you have questions.
• The biggest widget change is support for W3C packaging of widgets - this means Opera widgets might well work in Joost. Chuck Norris facts and Torus are the ones I tried out.

Please report all the bugs you find on the forum or email us. Remember to tell us you're using the preview release.

By all accounts, our first Joost Developer Day in London was quite a success. Hopefully all of the developers learned something about Joost and are excited to start developing for our platform – Dan, Libby, Colm and I all came away with great ideas.

Unfortunately, due to the busy holiday season, we’re postponing the upcoming Developer Days in Amsterdam and New York. 

We'll be rescheduling these events for early 2008, and, in the meantime, we've added the presentation from the London Developer Day to this site - and the widget tutorials remain here as well. So if you're thinking about starting work on a Joost Widget over the holidays, the tools available here should help you get started, and you can always join us in the Google group or the IRC channel if you have any questions.