First of all you'll see the new back in black visual theme. Yes, it introduces a complete change from the previous GUI, and what we are looking for is introducing a more attractive and usable interface. Now is your turn to give us your opinions. As I side note I'd mention that most of the GUI code has been rewritten or refactored, trying to give our end users this robust look and feel they were looking for.

Linux support: Plastic SCM is really committed to run on Linux operating systems. Since day one the Plastic server has been running on Linux distros using a Firebird database backend. Command line client and graphical tools like the differences and three-way merge application has been always available. But now the GUI tool is fully supported on Linux systems too! Some of our customers have been using 1.5 on Linux for months already, but 2.0 introduces a more attractive and Linux adapted looks. We are not the only ones considering Plastic 2.0 GUI as one of the most beautiful Linux graphical tools to date. What's your opinion here?

Multiple on-screen views: this is the real motivation behind the move to black. The previous 1.5 user interface was constrained to a single-view display. Users could visualize the workspace content on a left pane, and then choose between displaying branches, or branch contents, or item's history or checkouts, or... Yes, the key here is the word or. Now users can display branch contents and branch lists, and checkouts and... Everything can be on-screen at the same time, what we consider an enhanced and more productive user experience.

But Plastic developers wanted to go further, so the 2.0 GUI introduces another key component: the integrated query system. Yes, the query system is not new, it was first released together with 1.5, but obscurely kept to the command line users only. Now the Plastic Query System plays a key role in the GUI: most of the views are user configurable writing simple queries. You can choose which branches you're interested on, which labels you want to display and so on. And your settings get saved between sessions and workspaces. The query system plays already an important role in the GUI, and our plan is to make it more and more important in future releases, being able to help users to extract information for their repositories.

Changesets were also present in Plastic since the first release, but they were not treated as first class citizens until the new 2.0 GUI. Now the changesets view lets users explore all the available changesets, their contents and even run code inspections. The changesets view is also driven by the query system, so you'll be able to exactly specify which ones you want to see.

And one of the most exciting Plastic 2.0 GUI features is the new integrated code review system. The code review system introduces a way to compare baselines, a branch or changeset with their starting points or even compare branches side by side. You can use the code review system with any working pattern, but it is especially useful when you try to add a peer review step to every task in a task per branch pattern. Each task will go (as before) in its own branch, but now any developer will get a better support comparing the actual changes introduced in a certain task. This way Plastic introduces an agile an efficient way to run peer reviews on a task basis.