Announcing the Kendo UI Q2 2013 Roadmap!

It’s officially springtime, ladies and gentlemen, and you know what that means: lots of sunshine, the world is green again, and the Kendo UI team has emerged from our secret, maximum security lair to share another roadmap update!

Our Spring (Q1 2013) release was a great success, and if you’re an existing customer, we hope you’ve taken the time to upgrade and start using features like our new Kendo UI Web and DataViz widgets, out-of-the-box SPA functionality and Windows Phone 8 support for Kendo UI Mobile. If you’re a Java or PHP developer, I hope you’ve had a chance to check out our new server wrappers for PHP and Java JSP. Finally, if you’re not yet a Kendo UI customer, but want to be, what are you waiting for? Anyone buying Kendo UI today will get full access to the Q2 Beta in June and automatic upgrades for the Q2 and Q3 releases!

After wrapping up a great Q1 2013 release, it’s time to take a look at some of what we’ve been working on these last several weeks, and what you can expect this Summer from our Q2 2013 release.

What makes a roadmap?

Before I dive into the details of the Q2 roadmap, I thought it might be helpful to set the stage with a little background on how we arrive at our roadmap, in the first place. I like to re-share this information with each roadmap post, so you’re welcome to skip ahead if this isn’t your first rodeo, and you’ve read this section before.

UserVoice is our public forum for customer feedback, of course, but the data contained therein is only one piece of a much larger puzzle to fit together when it comes time to plan for a release. When planning a release, we gather all of your feedback from UserVoice, as well as relevant data from these sources:

• Industry research and analysis
• Direct customer surveys and feedback
• Forum posts and support requests
• Input from Telerik leadership

With all of this data in hand (and there is a lot of it!) the team gathers to prioritize all relevant requests, create a roadmap for the next few quarters, and establish themes for the current release. Themes categorize much of our focus, while also clearly defining the value we plan to deliver to you, our customers, in a given release. Though each release of Kendo UI is full of new features and fixes in our Web, DataViz or Mobile suites, we feel that it’s important to focus our release planning around a broad theme that represents the “big rocks” of value we want to provide. Many of these themes align to a single suite, while others affect the framework as a whole. Here’s a bit more about our Q2 theme, and a sneak preview of some of what’s coming in the Summer.

Q2 Release Theme: “Modern, Mobile and Lightning-Fast”

Building “cream-of-the-crop” web and hybrid mobile applications takes an understanding of modern app design, UX and a laser-focus on performance. The best web and hybrid mobile applications nail all three of these, and Kendo UI wants to help you do the same for your apps. To that end, our Q2 2013 release is structured around the idea of delivering features that make Kendo UI even more modern, mobile and lightning-fast, than ever.

Modern

The word, “modern” is a tricky one, and on the web it can be something of a moving target–one that changes far too often for most of us to keep up. However, in my mind, “modern,” as a guiding principle really means making sure that what you’re doing remains fresh and relevant to you and the users you’re building apps for. It’s not so much about specific trends or popular patterns, but about recognizing and embracing the ideas behind those.

For our Q2 release, we’re planning to deliver a few new features under the “modern” banner. This include a new, “Flat UI” theme for Kendo Web and a “Universal” theme for Kendo UI Mobile developers wanting to create a consistently-branded app across mobile devices. We’re also planning to introduce a Scheduler widget for Kendo UI Web, something that we know many of you have been eagerly anticipating.

Mobile

Though I already talked a bit about mobile in the context of “modern,” we’re doing a lot more in Kendo UI Mobile this quarter that I’m sure you’ll find interesting. That includes the creation of ASP.NET MVC Wrappers for Kendo UI Mobile, as well as the introduction of a “Drawer Menu” widget, a popular pattern that you can see in action with apps like Facebook, Rdio and Google+. We’ll also be making modifications to the Kendo UI Web Editor and Slider widgets to make them mobile-friendly and capable of adapting to smaller screens.

Lightning-Fast

The final sub-part to the theme of this release is “lightning-fast,” which pretty-much speaks for itself. With more and more of the web moving to phones, tablets and connected devices, performance is more important that ever. To that end, we’re working on a ton of performance improvements in Kendo UI for this release, from across-the-board improvements to Mobile, to scrolling and performance improvements in DataViz that will benefit all of our charts and graphs, right out of the box.

The items above are some of our “big rocks” for Q2, but there’s a lot more we’re working on. In addition to the items noted above, you can expect that we’ll deliver a number of other requested widgets, features and enhancements in our next release. For more information about additional features we plan to deliver, head on over to the Roadmap page on KendoUI.com.

The Kendo UI roadmap is a living document. Even though we’re focusing our efforts around the themes I shared here today, we’re always looking to deliver maximum value to our customers with each release. With that in mind, you should consider the public roadmap published at KendoUI.com to be a living document, as well. There’s always a chance that other key and requested features will find their way into our Q2 release, so keep an eye on that space over the coming months.

And as always, we want your feedback! If you’re interested in weighing in on the roadmap moving forward, head on over to our public UserVoice forum to view, comment and vote on ideas, or even add your own. We watch this forum regularly, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you’d like to see in a future release!

Links

• Main Roadmap Page
• Kendo UI Web Roadmap
• Kendo UI DataViz Roadmap
• Kendo UI Mobile Roadmap