I’ve seen a “beta” version mentioned a couple times here in the forum, but I can’t find any reference to getting a beta version.
How do you get one, or are those sent out only to known developers?
The Sparkle beta is a pre-release version of Sparkle’s next minor release. For example right now 3.0.8 is out and we’re working on 3.0.9. It’s really only small fixes and improvements that we send out to people who have seen specific issues. It’s not about known people, it’s about people who are affected by bugs. Once we reach a critical mass, or maybe some significant issue needs to be fixed for everybody as soon as possible, we release it. Critically we can’t give pre-release software to people who purchased from the AppStore, due to Apple’s licensing being different and their rules about how their licensing applies.
There are also downsides to pre-release software. You become a guinea pig for all the latest bugs (and occasionally they bite), it can be a hassle to update Sparkle frequently, sometimes even multiple times a day, and there’s additional debugging code which makes Sparkle more pedantic in some things.
Beta testing helps us make Sparkle more reliable, but all in all it’s not something that’s useful to most.