We are proud to announce the public release of the release candidate 1 for SharpE 0.8. Things went better than expected so we decided to skip another private test. So here it is, SharpE 0.8 RC1 unleashed to the public!

Please keep in mind that this is a release candidate, meaning that it's still a beta version!
The goal of the release candidate is to determine if the build is ready for a real release of SharpE 0.8 as stable version.
Please also note that due to several huge changes it is not possible to overwrite an already existing SharpE release or to use the settings of an older release! You have to do a fresh install!

The biggest difference to any previous release is that SharpE 0.8 RC1 comes with an easy to use installer and uninstaller. In addition download as .zip for advanced users is also available
Download: SharpE 0.8 RC1
Post Feedback (Bug Reports, Feature Requests) into this forum thread: Feedback Thread

The changelog is so huge again that I can't go into detail about every single change, here are some of the changes:

Icon Sets:
The icon sets have finally been reworked to a more modern structure. Besides more icons being included the sets are no longer based on .ico files. With the new icon sets being based on multiple .png files it should be a lot easier for users to create and share their own icon sets. A downside of this is that we had to say goodbye to the old CubeIX icon sets and that we currently only have 3 working icon sets in the release. However we hope that with the png changes users will put together more great icon sets quickly!

SharpCenter:
Again we have invested enormous work in fixing and improving SharpCenter. The changelog contains over 30 items just related to SharpCenter, and those are just the changes where we didn't forget adding them to the changelog. Overall SharpCenter is a lot more stable and faster now, in fact we fixed so many things that we consider SharpCenter to be fully stable now. Of course there might still be a few crashes - but those are just there so that we have something to fix until the final release of SharpE 0.8

Settings:
Regarding how the settings are saved two major changes have been made. The first is that it's now possible to store all your SharpE settings in the computers ApplicationData directory (where all other applications store their settings). The advantage of this is that you can now install SharpE in UAC protected directories (e.g. Program Files) on Windows Vista and 7 and that you can easily use the same settings between different/future releases of SharpE (any SharpE install on your computer will access the same settings in the AppData directory). But of course using it the old way where the settings are saved directly in the SharpE directory is also still possible (you can change which way you prefer it in the installer).
The second change is that we started implementing a more secure way of how all settings file are accessed, meaning that the annoying "File is already used by another process" error should be fixed now!

Besides this so many other things changed all over the shell that the Changelog is the longest we ever had.
Click "read the rest" to knock yourself out!

[ Read the rest ... ]