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[See the content of ELIPS Studio Beta 5 release, and targeted content for Beta 6 release.]
As usual, a short article to describe what's new in ELIPS Studio, this time for Beta 5 (out today), and what's coming next in Beta 6 (planned for the end of the month).
Beta 5: contents of ELIPS Studio new release
Flash Builder 4 support (and Flex as a plugin to Eclipse)
Until today, ELIPS Studio has existed as a plugin to Flex Buider 3. Reason for this choice was that, for some time, Flex Buidler 3 was the only official, and widely deployed version.
Well, things have changed now that Flash Builder 4 is released and generally available. Starting with Beta 5, ELIPS Studio now supports officially Flash Builder 4, in addition to Flex Builder 3.
We've also added an official support for installation where Flex is a plugin to Eclipse.
The support is built-in, you do not have to do anything specific, apart from having Flash Builder 4 on your machine before installing ELIPS Studio.
On Windows: ELIPS Studio will automatically detect your Flex Builder 3, Flash Builder 4 and Eclipse installs, and their installation path. You can however now edit the default path detected and shown in the installer.
On Mac: ELIPS Studio will automatically detect your Flex Builder 3, Flash Builder 4 and Eclipse installs, only if they were installed in their default path. If you changed the install path of those program, you will have to edit this setting in the ELIPS Studio installer, to provide the correct path.
Once installed, ELIPS Studio will create as many shortcuts as necessary:
- as before, the ELIPS Studio for Flex Builder
- and now in addition, a shortcut for Flash Builder and Eclipse
Mac "official" support, now available to all
Since the beginning of Beta 4, we've been delivering to some people asking for it, a "preview" of ELIPS Studio for Mac.
Thanks to the help of our Alpha testers, we're glad to say that our Mac version has improved, and that Mac is now supported just as Windows. More specifically our product supports Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Mac installer is available in the download section, alongside with the Windows version. And more importantly, it will now be released at the same pace. There are still some limitations for Mac compared to the Windows version, for example the Mac version does not support builing for Symbian.
Our alpha testing phase has ended, and now any issue you may find must be reported through our forum, just like any other issue in the product.
Once again, thanks to our Mac alpha users for their patience, and greatly documented issue reports!
Variant Management: more goodies
You may know now that we call "variant management" everything that releates to coping with device and platform fragmentation. It is more specifically, everything that needs to be done in order to make sure that your application runs correctly on devices with various platforms, screen sizes, features, etc.
You also may know that never was our promise "build once and run everywhere", simply because we don't beleive in the success of such paradigm, and because we believe that it is not respectful towards the platforms that host your application.
Our approach, and promise, has always been to minimise, and facilitate, this work, instead of making you beleive that this work was not necessary.
We're working in bringing significant improvements to this mechanism, with the target of allowing you to keep one same and unique codebase, and yet deploy to many different platforms and devices, being able to do some quite easy but powerful steps of platform / device oriented customization.
More specifically, Beta 5 brings 3 new improvements to this variant management thing.
Variant Management 1: CSS per platform / device
Until now, it was possible to easily handle variants by separating the assets (images, fonts) in subfolders, depending on the screen size you target. How this works: when you select several devices with different screen sizes, ELIPS Studio automatically creates, in the resources folder of your project, some subfolders, allowing you to have custom assets for custom sizes. At runtime, depending on the screen size, the correct image / font is used, defaulting to the one at the root of the resources folder, if none is found in the corresponding subfolder.
With the new release, you can also put a CSS there, so that you can define variants of your layouts easily, as you used to have variants of your assets.
It works exactly as for other assets: you can have one at the root (default), and one per subfolder corresponding to a screensize for which you want a custom layout. At runtime, the correct assets + CSS is used automatically, defaulting again to the root one.
Variant Management 2: Conditional code per platform / device
This features allows you to select components, and enable or disable them depending on the platform targeted. This allows, for example, to have a piece of your application which will be built only for some platforms. In addition to the already present Capabilities class, you can now customize quite deeply your application to adapt it to the platforms you target.
The new sample application "UICatalog" illustrates how to use this feature, but basically, when you would like to adapt some of your application behavior depending on the underlying platform, two mechanisms can be used:
- In ActionScript, use the
Capabilities class to check the device model, the platform or the screen size:
if (openplug.elips.device.Capabilities.getDeviceCapabilities().model == "iPhone"){
[...some code specific for the iPhone...]
}
- In MXML, use the
excludeFromPlatform or includeInPlatform properties on a UI Component to remove or add this component in the desired platform:
<mx:HBox excludeFromPlatform=" Android 1.6, iPhone OS 3.0"/>
Variant Management 3: cross-platform ScreenStack / ScreenView Navigation Model [preview]
This is our ultimate treat in terms of intelligent, platform respectful, but yet easy to use, variant management, and is an example of our vision in terms of cross-platform targeting.
You may know that navigation inside an application is very different on iPhone and on Android, for example. In iPhone, you have most of the time a navigation bar with a back button allowing you to go to the previous screen of your app. In Android, you have a hardware back button, no navigation bar, but a menu hardware button.
Our purpose is to enable you to create your application states and push your screen in the navigation model manager, and allow the platform adaptation there:
- if you build for iPhone, it will behave like an iPhone app, with the navigation bar and its back button
- if you build for Android, it will then by default not display the navigation bar, and react instead to the back and menu hardware buttons
Of course, this is the targeted behavior by default, you will be able to tweak that.
In Beta 5, we're delivering a preview of this feature. You will be able to create your application structure and push states / screens into it. The basic behavior is implemented in ActionScript, and is behaving in a generic way, whatever the platform is. The generic implementation is used, as always, when there is no native implementation overcharging it.
In next releases, we'll map this model to native navigation models, specifically on iPhone and Android.
Check out the new sample application UI Catalog, which illustrates this new concept.
Android improvements
You know that one of our targets is to increase Android support to at least the iPhone level.
We've progressed quite strongly on Beta 5, with additional services (addressbook, keypad with back button support), and native widget mapping (list, popup). You can try a list on Android: it's based on the native one, and therefore behaves as the native one, with hardware acceleration and smoothness.
Another change that we have made to the Android support is a new toolchain. We had some stability issues with the former one (some random crashes in some rare cases). This should be solved now, we're using a toolchain which is 100% compatible to the Android native platform.
And...
iPad full screen support...
By popular demand, we've looked into this platform a bit more.
We've modified the runtime so that iPad native HD screen is now supported.
It's not yet "built-in" yet, you will have to tweak the generated XCode project to build for the iPad. But you should be able to start developing your iPad apps quite nicely.
Go and check the iPad tutorial for more information and to get started with your first iPad app. And yes, bring us back some nice iPad demonstrators!!
Other improvements and bug fixes
As usual, quite a large number of improvements and bug fixes, either requested by users, of internally found. Release notes are detailing these changes.
Amongst the ones that were requested by users, and quite popular, Matrix is supported (can be used for computation, not for UI Component manipulation).
Beta 6: coming end of May, our last beta release!
Beta 6 is planned end of May, and is supposed to be our last beta before our commercial release.
Android native extensions
As for the iPhone, you will be able to extend the framework with your own native services. The tool will generate the mapping code and java project structure, leaving you to implement the native part quite easily.
Sadly we were not able to deliver this feature in a good shape in Beta 5. This is mainly due to some stability issues we faced on Android, due to a mismatch with our toolchain, and we had to correct those in priority.
Android improvements
Improvements, as: more services, more UI components natively mapped, more stability and better performances, on all versions of Android from 1.6.
Android will be brought to the level of iPhone support
Better performance on Android (& Symbian)
Following beta 5 efforts to change the toolchain and adopt one that is 100% compatible with the native platform, this time we're planning to upgrade it to one that take full benefit of Android phone processors and hardware.
You can expect a great deal of performance improvement there, especially for all that is related to computation.
Variant Management final: cross-platform Navigation Model, with full native mapping
As explained above, Beta 5 contains a preview of the cross-platform navigation model, and contains only the generic implementation.
In Beta 6, we plan to map this implementation to native platforms, and bring this feature to its full potential, allowing to easily develop cross-platform, but yet platform-respectful, applications.
(Better) iPad support...
We plan improvements for iPad support, to allow an easier flow (no tweaking of XCode project).
- Cristian Livadiotti
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I downloaded 2 times ELIPS_STUDIO_3_0_1_284-69_MAC.zip and unzip it gave me the same error: CRC error extracting item.
thks.