Ah, finally! The final, gold version of CityDesk 2.0 is now shipping. Yes, it’s a completely free upgrade.

We used to have both a Home Edition and a Professional Edition. That was a brave experiment, which was, I have to admit, something of a failure. Call it the Fog Creek PCjr. We wanted to make a cheaper entry-level version of CityDesk, but in the end we made something that was too cheap to support profitably, and which ended up making people worry about article count limits and go to ridiculous lengths to keep their sites under 500 pages. It wasn’t fair to sell a crippled version of the product at a price that we simply couldn’t maintain, so we’re going to stop selling the Home Edition altogether, and eat the cost of moving every existing Home Edition user to the Professional Edition. We also lowered the price of the Professional Edition a smidgen (to $299), and introduced a lower cost Contributor Edition for team members who don’t actually design sites, they just maintain them.

If you still haven’t seen them, Michael and I made two movies (in Flash format) with demos of the latest features. Bring popcorn! These movies were made with TechSmith‘s Camtasia Studio, which worked like a charm (and no, you cynical freaks, they are not paying me to say that. Sheesh.) If you’re completely new to CityDesk check out this online demo (I, for one, can’t bear to hear my own voice so you’ll have to watch it without me.)