If you are on Linux or OS X you might ask why we have decided to first release on the Windows platform. And why the releases for Linux and OS X will happen a few months later. Here is why.

We believe we can deliver better quality if we focus on one platform first. By having the whole team focusing on one platform we can get a release out sooner than it would be possible by supporting all three platforms from the beginning.

And the sooner we release, the earlier we get bug reports. And this benefits the quality. When we are going to release on the other platforms the back-end code will already be well community-tested. And even the first releases on Linux and OS X will have a decent quality.

But why did we choose Windows as the first platform? Actually, it was not us – it was you, our users. Looking at the bug reports we got for the old GUI tools it is clear that 90% of the reports are for Windows. And that made the choice easy.

The question remains why we do not use Java or a cross platform GUI toolkit. The answer for that is that a lot of developers do not want Java to be installed on their development machine. I personally love Java as a language but I can see their point, so that was not an option. For the cross platform GUI toolkits – we have tried a number of them. But non of them really delivered what we needed.

So I hope our fellow Linux and OS X users (I’m on OS X now as well) will understand our motivation behind this decision and will be even more happy when they are going to try Workbench on their platform and find it working very well.