ICE development is built on frequent (usually two week) engineering cycles. Each cycle in the roadmap, we build, test and pilot software and write documentation based on a set of tickets describing no more than one day's work. We do this using another open source system called Trac.

ICE 2.0 Beta now available

2008-04-07 ICE 2.0 Beta released
2007-12-04 ICE 2.0 Alpha released

Note: It is not recommend to use ICE 2.0 if you are using the same repository with others using version 1.2.

Source code is available from http://ice.usq.edu.au/svn/ice/trunk
The binaries are available from http://ice.usq.edu.au/svn/ice/downloads/unstable

New features and improvements

The biggest difference between version 1.2 and 2.0 besides the interface is how ICE stores the different renditions of documents and their properties (i.e. PDFs, images etc). Previously document renditions and properties were stored as Subversion properties unfortunately this has limitations that were not meant to exist according to the Subversion documentation. ICE now creates its own properties, as a result there are less problems with Subversion and improved display times. Other major differences include:

• Interface updates designed around flexible workflow

  • One click to edit

  • Action icons

  • Functionality broken up into tabs

  • Etc

• Document rendering functionality available as a services

• Text searching

• Inline annotations

• Plugin functionality

• Multi-threading (render documents while viewing others)

• Able to run as either a server or client side application

• Inbuilt configuration files (skin and site behavior)

• Support for embedding HTML files inline

• Strict XHTML output improvements, etc.

View demos or specific changes as Trac tickets for ICE 2.0.

Known faults

Note: As this is a Beta version there are still many faults we are working through. If you find any major problems that we have not yet found nor ticketed, please contact us. Below are are list of the most critical faults to be aware of.

• The “Sync” and “Sync package” buttons don't sync all properties #5583

• Error adding repository via SVN URL #5569

• Search returns no results when content is first checkout #5577

• Toolbar button status not updating properly in IE (6 & 7) #5582

• Advanced options: Converting documents between .doc and .odt fail #5575

• Advanced options: Repair documents not available #5576

• Tabs and buttons don't work in some versions of IE 6 (more testing required)

• Unable to use ICE with OpenOffice.org 2.4 – issue logged with OOo #87948