I try not to throw too many out-and-out advertisements into this blog, but I’m very proud to announce that Kiln 1.2 is out.

When Kiln 1.0 shipped back in February, it was awesome, but still very much a 1.0 product. While Kiln’s still under heavy development, we’ve tremendously improved a lot of the little things that make the difference between “functional” and “fun,” and I’m happy to say that Kiln’s increasingly strongly in the latter camp.

Since our initial launch, we’ve:

• Added custom extensions to more tightly integrate Mercurial with Kiln
• Integrated reviews directly into Kiln’s activity feed
• Rewritten the importer tool to handle much weirder Subversion layouts—and in a more friendly manner to boot
• Made the interface just plain look nicer, and have lots more ajax for faster load times
• Begun building an API so tools can interact with Kiln
• Added “web hooks”, so that Kiln can notify other systems when you push new changesets
• Beefed up keyboard shortcuts all over the place (Hit Ctrl-; to activate them, just as in FogBugz)
• Drastically improved performance across the entire application
• Added ever-more-comprehensive search (and made it run faster)
• Upgraded the version of Mercurial used in Kiln to 1.5.1

There’s lots more; you can see the full release notes for Kiln 1.2 to get the whole skinny. If you want to give it a whirl, just go create a Kiln Student and Startup account, which is free for up two users and comes with unlimited repositories and space, and have fun. (And no worries—you don’t need to be a student or a startup. We just think they’ll get the most value of the product.)

We’ll have some more cool announcements soon, but for now, that ought to hold you.