Last year, we were on fire. We added a bunch of new tests to the app, completely revamped the assumption check system, added support for Python and Julia, and threw in a live Python terminal for good measure. We also made lots of user-interface improvements, fixed all sorts of bugs, and generally made the app even more appealing for lecturers and students in search of a modern, accessible (and touch-friendly) statistics app.

Related to this, 2021 saw another big leap in the number of people using statscloud. Personally, I'm staggered by how quickly statscloud has grown, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has been using the app over the last few years. The bug reports, features requests, social media posts... everything. Undeniably, your support has helped get the app to where it is today and enabled us to take our next big step forward.

Our first major release

That leads us to our big news for 2022, which is that statscloud will finally be coming out of beta this year! Now that the beta version is quite stable, and provides everything needed for the majority of undergraduate social science courses, we're now at a stage where the app is fully-featured enough to justify a major release. However, rather than just patch up the current beta version, we decided to get a little more ambitous.

Over the last year, we focused our efforts on building a brand new version of the app; one that's rebuilt from the ground up using the latest technology. We're now just a few months away from finalising this and ensuring it matches all the features of the current beta (and has a load more) and we're expecting this to be ready in Q2 this year.

The main feature of this is that it will be much more stable. If you used the app early on, you may have been unfortunate enough to experience the 'white screen of death', where the app would crash suddenly (sorry about that). With our new (typesafe) version, this should be a thing of the past. The new app will also be quicker, and packed with some powerful new features, such as the ability to work with much larger data sets and perform some more advanced analyses.

The new app will look near-identical the current beta too, with only some slight user-interface changes. We realise that many of you have been authoring text resources for teaching purposes and we know how annoying it would be if the app suddenly looked different. Don't worry, we've thought about you, and you can be assured that all your teaching materials will still be bang up to date. In any case, we'll keep the beta version online so you can continue to use that version as long as you want to and migrate over to the new version whenever you're ready. The beta won't be disappearing any time soon, and we'll give you plenty of notice before it does!

Another feature of our new app is that it will be a full Progressive Web App. The current beta is already a Progressive Web App in that you can pin it to your taskbar or add it to your device's homescreen and can continue to use it even when your internet connection disappears. One thing we learned from the past couple of years is that it's crucial that all students can access a statistics package reliably on any device they own, and we're dedicated to ensuring we continue to provide a free statistics package that works on any device, on and offline. Even today, statscloud is the only statistics app that offers this.

A rollout of the Pro version

You may already be aware that we will offer multiple versions of statscloud; a CORE version, that emulates the current beta and will be available to everyone for free, and a PRO version that comes with some additional features; most notably, the ability to save your projects online to your own dashboard and access these anywhere from any device.

As you may expect, we've had a huge amount of interest in the PRO version and I'm happy to say that, this year, we intend to start rolling it out. Over the summer, we'll release this to selected users and, if all goes according to plan, make it more widely available towards the end of the year. Of course, if you're interested in testing this out, please do get in touch and we can arrange for you to have a free trial.

Memberships to the PRO version will come with a subscription fee, but we intend to keep these as modest as possible. Otherwise, you can be assured that the CORE version will always be available, will always retain the features it has currently, and will always be free.

Stay tuned

Over the last few years, we've got into a nice habit of releasing the occassional ground-breaking feature every few months. For the first quarter of 2022, our efforts will be on finalising the new version of the app, so we'll be holding off on those ground-breaking feature announcements just for a little while.

Do stick around until then though because, once our new version is out, we'll have a ton of very exciting things to share with you.