After more than two years of pre-release versions of Small Basic, we are finally releasing the 1.0 version.  Although we know that there a number of features we still haven’t implemented, we feel that Small Basic now has a solid set of the core features that make it useful to beginners.  We hope to get everyone onto the 1.0 version so that we have a common baseline to move forward.

Over the past few months, we have been focused largely on our online experience and also the Small Basic translation efforts.  There is a huge demand for Small Basic outside the US, and so we want to help beginners in other parts of the world to get started in programming.  Here’s what’s new:

• Small Basic 1.0 – Small Basic 1.0 is a minor update to version .95 with the following changes:
  • The Icelandic language was added through the great work of a volunteer in the community.  (Thanks to Jon B Georgsson!)  The addition of Icelandic brings us to 20 languages.  That’s pretty amazing and demonstrates both the strong demand for local versions of Small Basic for and also the great support we have from the global Small Basic community.
  • We updated the Small Basic setup and version information.
  • Some editorial bugs were fixed in the strings used by Small Basic.
  • The End User License Agreement (EULA) has been updated to reflect that Small Basic is no longer considered ‘Pre-Release’ software.

Although we haven’t really added new features in 1.0, besides Icelandic, we do have a list of feature requests from users, and we are looking at how we can add them in the future.  I also want to let you know about some new Small Basic extensions from our friends at the TeachingKidsProgramming website.  More details below…

TeachingKidsProgramming provides free courseware to introduce kids (ages 10+) to programming.  New in this compatible release of the Small Basic Fun extensions (http://extendsmallbasic.codeplex.com) is a recipe '(m)adLibs' which you can use to introduce the MVC pattern to your kids.  It includes several new objects, such as a Viewer and a Parser to support teaching of this pattern.

• New Small Basic website on MSDN – A lot of work has gone into re-creating the Small Basic website.  We hope you will find it useful.  In addition to a new look and cleaner design, we have also partnered with Computer Science for Kids to publish sample chapters from several of their Small Basic E-books on our site.  We hope you will find these high-quality guides useful for learning and having fun with Small Basic.
• Translated Curriculum – We’ve been receiving requests from abroad for translated versions of our teaching curriculum.  So over the last several months we have put a lot of effort into making this curriculum available in more languages.  This is a work in progress as some languages still have English screenshots, but we do now have all languages translated.  You can find the curriculum here.

Finally, we’d like to thank the Small Basic community for your passion around this product and for teaching young people the joys of computer programming.  The Small Basic Virtual Team shares your passion, and we look forward to our continued partnership on this project.

The Small Basic Virtual Team