After nine months of work by our software team, and several weeks of sprinting by Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, and myself, we're very happy to announce the Squeak Etoys 4 release candidate!

What's a release candidate, you ask? Well, it's hopefully the final version, but we want more testing first. It's better than a beta, but not quite ready for real use. We'll be releasing the Etoys 4 final on October 21st.

Please help us test the new Etoys! We want to make sure that it's rock solid before getting used in schools and homes throughout the world.

You can download the Etoys 4 release candidate here.

It's at the bottom, below the fancy icons, under "Release Candidates."

To learn what's new in Etoys 4, you can start by watching an interview with Scott Wallace here.

You can also learn about the new beta showcase by watching this video.

For those in a hurry, the Etoys 4 highlights include:

* loading and sharing projects directly to the central Squeakland Showcase

* fully "license clean", so that it can be included in Linux distros, etc.

* improved toolbar and viewer

* optional drop-down categories for the project info box

* lots of fixes and new translations throughout

If you find any problems, you can first try our chat channel.

or post in our forums (or mailing lists).

If you're able to reproduce the error, feel free to add a ticket to our issue tracker.

We've been pushing ourselves for quite a while, so you might not see much activity this weekend, at least from me & Bert :)

We'll respond to your comments on Monday, or earlier if we can't resist peeking in the office door.

Special thanks to everyone who made suggestions or helped us test the betas. We'd be nowhere without our community!