Spark 2.6.0 RC1 has been released on November 17, 2010. It was a long period of silence since the last Beta 2 release and even longer since the latest Final release. But the work was continued, one project leader changed the other. There were a lot of changes in the code, both seen in the UI (color changes, additional options and buttons) and under the hood (lots of proprietary code replaced with open source analogs). Some new features were introduced, bugs fixed, and of course some new bugs introduced As i said, the work is constantly continued by 3-6 volunteer contributors. The plan is to release RC2 in December and then the Final release next year in January. Meanwhile we ask the community to try out RC1 and report about the issues in the forums.
There is no official changelog still, so i will just give a link to a list of 2.6.0 bugs in the tracker, 90% of them are fixed already.
Downloads for different platforms can be found on Beta Releases downloads page
Important note before upgrading! In 2.6.0 RC1 user’s profile path has been changed to …Username\Application Data\Spark (Windows XP), …Username\AppData\Roaming\Spark (Vista/Win7) or $HOME/.Spark (Linux). If you want to use same preferences and have old history, copy user’s profile folder to a new location and Spark will pick it up. Old location was just the …Username\Spark. There is no automatic import option in the installer so far and it is not known if there will be one. So keep this in mind.