Previous alphas had a very flat look and feel with a new slightly wider font. Is that on hold or is it likely to reappear in a later 2019.1 alpha?
Here it’s important to understand what Unity’s preview builds are. For example that 2019.1 build with the new UI Theme is a separate preview build, it’s not regular 2019.1.0 alpha.
Unity does these from time to time to gather feedback from users, they put some experimental / wip system on some custom build and share it with users to get more opinions, they are not to be confused with regular builds even when their name tags match with such (IMO they should put custom names to these to avoid this kind of confusion).
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Also worth noting that in the latest Unite Roadmap talk, they said new UI Theme is going to be shipped with 2019.2:
ok. Its a little confusing but I guess what else do you call an Alpha build? Private and Public Alpha? Anyway, nice that they are opening it up and little.
Alpha is alpha - it will become a beta later.
Beta is beta - it will become a release later.
Experimental is something that might or might not happen at all.
Preview is a specific feature Unity are letting people look at early. The reason it is not an alpha or beta is because they don’t have any idea when it will become part of the main Unity.
None of it has crossover and IMHO none of it is confusing.
Well, Unity using official alpha/beta release names for preview builds IS confusing, IMO they should label them differently. Like for Editor Theme preview, they could just tag the preview build as 2019.1.0a5-theme-preview etc to make it clear it’s not the actual 2019.1.0.a5 build.
For example, this is the latest preview build for the new Editor Theme: https://beta.unity3d.com/download/39a6fe9ccce2/public_download.html
Download page only says “Unity 2019.1.0a5 Early Feedback downloads”. It’s clearly confusing as we got similar preview build for ECS during some 2018 beta cycle and people got really confused as they thought it was an actual beta and then wondered why they couldn’t run it on “next” beta version.
So in nutshell, alpha/beta/preview labels themselves are all pretty clear but labeling preview builds as alpha/beta isn’t.
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That just means it’s forked off that doesn’t it?
Pretty much yes but it’s also usually forked before the actual release it’s tagged to be, for example that editor theme build could be forked of from trunk that’s between 2019.1.0a4 and a5 (or it could be using the final a5 as basis, we wouldn’t know the exact version).