News

These are the general news and news regarding the web site. For a changelog, see changes.

2010-03-15 : tekui-0.8j has been released today. This is a very strong update. Regarding programming comfort: The DEBUG mode has been disabled in the default distribution. This finally allows the programmer to place arbitrary variables in objects at any time, which was a stumbling block for many who tried tekUI in the past. An onClick() handler was added, which allows the programmer to react on abstract activation events in almost any element, without the need to use the cumbersome onPress() handler. Also, this version contains a preview of the new editor class, which is based on the new Sizeable. This class allows element resizing without intrusive repaints. The prototype editor represents just the most generic form, from which a multi-line, a new single-line text input field as well as a new floating text class shall be derived in the future. The notification system has been beefed up in that it now supports class-wide notifications, for which a copy-on-write scheme creates instance copies on demand; this is another meta-table magic which not only saves huge amounts of memory, but improves startup time as well. Last not least, thanks to this change, notification handlers have become so cheap that virtually any state variable may come with a predefined handler in the future. Newly added handlers include onSetStyle(), onSetClass(), onDblClick(), onHold(), onClick() and some more I forgot. Check out the style.lua test, which allows you to edit an element's style properties in a running application. Before I forget to mention this: The Drawable class has been removed, and most of the logic moved into the C library. This eliminates a whopping Lua stack frame in all drawing operations. Inevitable run-time geometric data like Rect, MinMax etc. is now stored in Region objects, which further reduces the memory footprint. The default layouter has been partly rewritten to operate on more C data structures and fewer Lua stack. Drawing operations now always accept symbolic colors - no need to convert them over a pen table anymore, which simplifies drawing considerably. Summary: this version is faster, uses fewer memory, is easier to program, and introduces new functionality.

2010-01-05 : tekui-0.8i released. You will hardly notice a visual difference, but this is a monstrous update, as it gets most of the remaining architectural issues straight. The complex and ugly refresh/relayout logic vanished completely, layouting is now better isolated and has been simplified, a fixed-coordinates layouter has been added, any number of author and user style sheets, direct formattings and hardcoded class properties can now be cascaded... oh yes, the property management: the former naive approach has been kicked out and replaced by a metatable graph, which reduced startup time to a fraction. Many less prominent class members are now available as style properties only, which reduces the memory footprint considerably. The list of changes is endless and consists mainly of simplifications. I'm quite confident that the next releases can and will once and for all focus on the incomplete UI class library. Btw., be sure to use the offline documentation, as the documentation on the web site lags behind in navigation comfort.

2009-09-06 : tekui-0.8h has been released today. Among the most notable changes are fixed and improved hotkey handling, strict enforcement of class versions, improved fullscreen support in the X11 driver, new symbolic colors ("black", "white", "fuchsia", etc.), a corrected argument parser, double buffer support. A myriad of minor improvements came with this version as well.

2009-06-18 : tekui-0.8g has been released. This update was mostly about an improved Window and Application setup procedure, improvements in the documentation, and the usual bug fixes.

2009-05-23 : tekui-0.8f has been released today. As we are heading towards a beta release, we are now in a phase of frequent API changes to improve its consistency in the long run. Most notably, the show() method has lost one argument and its return value; while this is probably a welcome simplification, it also breaks existing code. To make up for this, this version profits from speed improvements and reduced memory usage again, especially in managing regions and parsing style sheet properties. Some styling options were added in that the Canvas class now supports child margins, which also helped to get rid of complicated workarounds in other places. The module compiler and linker can now be used from the command line.

2009-05-08 : tekui-0.8e has been released today. This version has seen speed improvements, structural and API changes, bugfixes, and preliminary texture support. You can use texture.css and supply some textures of your own to get an impression, but it's probably too early to use this feature on a regular basis. Also notable: It seems Xft and the Composite extension are no longer mutually exclusive in recent versions of X11, so we have reenabled antialiased font rendering in this case; hopefully this works on your computer, too. We have also created another Windows snapshot, but due to some kind of latency bug, the X11 version still feels about 10 times faster.

2009-05-08 : Added regular releases and a changelog. The changelog and the online manual are now supposed to update themselves automatically when a new release comes out. Let's see if these things work out.

2009-05-05 : Texture and graphics support is coming up - soon. See the screenshots section.

2009-04-25 : Website documentation updated; added another Windows snapshot today

2009-04-19 : Improved refresh logic: further reduced the number of repaints, some cases (especially sliders) should feel less sluggish now

2009-04-16 : Improved general image and bitmap support (still not complete though), more consolidation of attribute names, improved TextInput, DirList and file requester, some cleanup. Finally, the documentation in the archive is now sorted alphabetically - this applies to both class and function names. (Note: The online documentation has not been updated yet.)

2009-03-28 : Added a great many of enhancements, most notably faster border rendering and improved examples and tutorials. The Canvas class now descends from the Frame class, giving it a border option, which is used by the FloatText and ListView classes for a nicer appearance. A few attributes have been renamed.

2009-03-16 : The manuals and tutorials on this web site have been updated to reflect the recently created snapshot. This version also got a tag in the repository.

2009-03-15 : The Windows display driver is mostly complete. Get the regular snapshot or perform a normal checkout if you intend to build it yourself. Otherwise, for the impatient, a pre-packaged snapshot for the Windows platform can be found in the download section. There are some issues left with keyboard input and popups, but for a first preview it should be Ok!

2009-03-12 : Major update. Several new demos added, the number of windows/popups is now unlimited, simplified message handling and dispatch, improved touchscreen support, slowly evolving Windows driver (but don't expect anything usable yet)

2009-03-04 : The script serving the repository via HTTP stopped working for unknown reasons. This has been corrected (or worked around). In addition to that, a daily snapshot was added to the releases section.

2009-02-22 : A Windows display driver has been added to the repository. It is not fully functional, and Windows support isn't official yet.

2008-11-14 : tekUI is currently being used for the development of a commercial home entertainment system. This somewhat slowed down the architectural progress, but it led to innumerous improvements, mainly in the appearance and stability department, which we are frequently merging back into the public repository.

2008-09-04 : Localization added - it's in the repository. See also the screenshots section.

2008-08-01 : For the Alpha 2 release, cascading stylesheet (CSS) support is coming up, including element, class, pseudo class and individual formattings. You can also expect some hefty speed improvements, the appearance of drawing hooks and an overall slicker appearance. See also the screenshots section for the latest in self-adulation.

2008-07-21 : The online manual has been updated. Note: a few broken links are due to unresolved differences between the formats used in the documentation generator and the CMS; if this annoys you, use the offline HTML documentation, which should be correct.

2008-06-30 : download section added; alpha 1 released today

2008-06-30 : Documentation added

2008-06-18 : TODO section added

2008-05-14 : Technical description updated, installation manual added

2008-05-06 : screenshots section added.

2008-05-02 : Website update - but still no release, sorry.