Its been a long time, but the time has finally come to release a new version of Habit. We're calling this version 2.2.1, and there's a lot that's changed. We have a new User's Manual (draft version), and we've submitted a methods paper describing habit2. Here's some of the key changes you'll see (and some that you won't see):

• More flexibility in experiment design. In habit2 you can design experiments with any number of phases (instead of the fixed 3-phase experiments from the previous version). 
• Template experiments - habit2 comes with a set of template experiments (described in our methods paper) that reproduce several experiments, each of which illustrates a different methodology.
• Settings saved per-workspace. The previous version of habit saved your preferences for all instances of habit running on your computer. In habit2, however, your preferences (monitor selections and stimulus root folder) are saved separately for each workspace you use. 
• Dual-stimulus synchronicity! Dual-stimulus experiments do not display a visible latency between the presentation on each of the stimuli monitors. In the previous version of habit, there was a visible lag between the two monitors. No more!
• Windows version coming soon! You heard that right, I've got a beta version for windows that I'll be releasing _very_ soon. Stay tuned!

   You can't have an update like this without a few WORDS OF CAUTION: If you are currently collecting data using the previous version of habit, you should continue to do so with the same version until the study is/are complete. This is a precaution against introducing systematic differences in your data set(s), which may depend in some way on the version of habit.  If you begin a study using habit2, however, you can continue to collect data using any updates to habit2 that may come along. 

   The newest version of habit2 will coexist with habit. There are implications to this which you should understand. First and foremost, habit2 uses a different database format than habit did. As a consequence, when you open a workspace with habit2, your database (which holds all of your experiment settings) is copied and updated to work with habit2. Once this happens, changes made to your experiments using habit2 do not affect the settings in your original habit database. 

   This may be confusing for some of you - especially those of you that have ongoing experiments and must continue using original habit. For those of you who are using habit2 for the first time, or if you do not have ongoing experiments which require original habit, none of this matters. You may uninstall original habit manually if you choose. 

A word or two about ... bugs

   Like any good software developer, I do NOT include bugs in my code, and I certainly never intentionally included any in this version of Habit. I've found that there are ways, mainly due to neutrino interactions with my hard drive, that bugs do find their way into Habit. 

   OK, that's not true. There are certainly bugs in Habit. There's over 100,000 lines of code in there, believe it or not, and there's bound to be a mistake or two lurking. And after a huge update like this, well, I can only test so much. 

   That's where you come in. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you find bugs, have questions about configuring an experiment, or have feature suggestions that you (and other users) might find helpful.