Did you try via the
URL or app?
No tricks. But the guys who whipped up the demo are really good. I'm pretty sure those projects will be made available with the release.
Had a quick look of the demo on my phone...
Unless they pulled a game demo trick, this looks gorgeous.
My take is that the beta is really early but coming together very quickly. I suspect that a public beta will precede the actual release. The team was ridiculously ambitious to have something to show for ICC and worked ungodly hours to make it happen.
To add a little context, I had the opportunity to play with a version from about 3 weeks ago. No documentation yet, except some blurbs from the spec (which I had to bug the engineers for) to figure things out. For example, no user interface (UI) to help with binding, only "hand jamming" paths. Similarly, property editors for some data types were available, but not others. Alpha version stuff - not ready to put in front of experienced Ignition users. With all that, I had a hard time forcibly breaking it - malformed inputs, manipulating data types, trying to cleverly create and break bindings. I didn't hit scripting, though. To be honest, a bit frustrating - I've always been able to break Beta versions. If I were to give feedback it would be about incomplete UI - yep, they are certainly aware of that. My assumption is that the mature "platform" is coming through there.
So fast forward 3 weeks to ICC and they pulled the crazy stunt of having Travis and Kevin do a live, on-stage "Build-a-thon" competition. What could possibly go wrong? In under an hour, they both came up with functional PLC driven mobile-responsive projects with status and differing degrees of history and alarming. Kevin's project could change the look and feel of the whole project between "high performance HMI" and "standard" with a checkbox and Travis put together a whole host of neat tricks. I was constantly cracking up at how they worked around the early version. I could see Kevin constantly cutting and pasting components to "put them on top" since 'Z-order/"move to front"' was not yet implemented. I could also see Travis doing some manual ninja JSON editing - I'm sure because some part wasn't complete. Travis' designer crashed once on stage, but he was able to re-open and continue.
All of this to say that the current "Beta" has come a long way, fast. I wouldn't want a version from last month in front of anyone. Similarly, I wouldn't want to put the current version in front of "Joe Public" - major functions are still being worked - it would be an exercise in frustration. I suspect that after a taste at ICC, the community wants to play with Perspective, regardless of the design state. However, 5 months until a full production version (Feb 19), which I'm sure will include documentation, video tutorials in the "IA University", and demo projects is ambitious and I'm sure they'll pull it off.
A colleague asked me why I thought they might be releasing it as a private beta, rather than a public like they have always done.