Roadmap? News?

[Sander Bouwhuis]

Thanks, but I'll wait until v5. I'll keep using WinMerge for now.

[PwrSrg]

I too have been waiting for Dark Mode. For 5 YEARS actually.

[TTT101]

We haven't announced a release date for Beyond Compare 5. If you purchase Beyond Compare 4 now, it includes 12 months of upgrade protection.

Upgrade Policy: https://www.scootersoftware.com/shop...=upgradepolicy

According to upgrade policy: "You only get automatic upgrade protection when you pay full price for a license. "
Does this exclude licenses purchased e.g. on upcoming April Fools Sale 20% off?
And of course mandatory question, is version 5 going to be released within one year from now?

[Chris]

If you purchase using a sale coupon, you still get the automatic upgrade protection for 1 year after purchase.

Purchases using an upgrade credit, such as a free or half price upgrade from BC3 to BC4, don't include the 1 year of upgrade protection.

Our developers are working very hard on version 5, but they haven't set a release date yet.

[TobiasKnauss]

Any news regarding the development and release of BC v5?
Has been a while since the last update.
Can you give a preview of new functionality?

[Aaron]

We don't have any announcements at this time, but we'd try to follow up here and post in the News and Announcements forum, which I recommend subscribing to for emailed notifications. We've had roadmaps in the past, but no matter how cautiously we try to be with our wording, we don't want customers to base current purchasing decisions on future features that might not make it in.

We're making good progress and it's what our developers are primarily focusing on these days.

[misiektoja]

Will v5 run natively on Apple Silicons ? It is the only SW I have that still requires Rosetta and I would like to get rid of it.

[Chris]

Beyond Compare 5 will run natively on Apple CPUs (M1/M2). Our developers haven't set a release date for BC5 yet, but they're pretty far along in the development process.

[PwrSrg]

I too have been waiting for Dark Mode. For 5 YEARS actually.

Make that 6 YEARS now.

[Aaron]

It's taken longer than we'd like, but we are getting closer. I mention above, but I recommend subscribing to our News and Announcements sub-forum for email notifications. It's where we post release information as well as a location we'd post potential testing opportunities. As you may note, we've been pretty busy with some large BC4 releases in that timeframe, and Dark mode support wasn't a small enhancement task. It's taken quite a lot of work to replace all the components necessary to support it, and we hope it will meet your expectations when we're able to release it.

[Sander Bouwhuis]

The wait for v5 is just ridiculous. I'm glad I didn't buy it 1.5 years ago when I was assured I had a 12 month free upgrade.
I decided to buy UltraCompare. It is similarly priced and has dark mode. You guys/girls really dropped the ball on this.

[Aaron]

We haven't announced our upgrade policy yet, but we try to be extremely fair so any recent (and perhaps not so recent) purchases are covered. But any purchase decisions should be for the current feature set and not the potential future versions. Once we have more to share, it would be well worth for existing customers to check what our current policy is as they may find it more beneficial than expected.

From a quick browse, it appears that UltraComapre runs on different subscriptions (including their perpetual license, with renewable maintenance after 1 year), while BC4's license has covered all 4.x updates since launch in 2014. I don't see their full pricing publicly posted, but given our average major version life cycle, I think BC is quite a deal even for users who fall outside the free upgrade protection window and would qualify for the half priced upgrade.

[TobiasKnauss]

I would like to see an improved comparison of MS Office files in v5, especially Excel files. The current comparison of Excel files is quite useless, it does not even recognize/show the presence of multiple spreadsheets in the file.
Also, it would be nice to optionally see some indicators for formatting differences in the comparison view, e.g. different background color or frame of the cells (if Excel files) or text blocks (if PDF or other non-plain-text files). The formatting differences itself may be listed in 2 separate rows on the bottom. If showing the formatting differences is enabled then, the section of the differences need to split also on transitions of formatting differences.

[Timo Suoranta]

FYI, for those who still are eagerly waiting for dark theme support (including myself):

On Windows 11 you can use Accessibility / Color Filter to effectively enable dark mode in BC4. This works much better than I had imagined, so I had not tried it before. Now, I have enabled the keyboard shortcut for the Color Filter toggle. I also remapped the key to more comfortable Alt-C with Power Toys / Shortcut Remap. With color filter on, I adjust the colors in BC4 to be what I want. Only annoyance is that I have to press the toggle key when using BC, and the icons look a bit funny (that one I really don't care).

Still, I am hoping to see proper dark mode in BC soon.

[fbboisclair]

One pretty big and frustrating limitation with BC4 is that we can't use S3 compatible service when you support Amazon S3 natively... Yes, I can do a workaround using Rclone serve or by other way... But seriously, you should get BC5 out with proper support for S3 quickly...

As a stimulus, Rclone serve S3 should be available in November 2023... Meaning if you could get BC5 with S3 support outside Amazon, we could use your software with a lot of cloud provider using Rclone as a bridge.