[See the content of ELIPS Studio Beta 7 release, and going forward]

What's new in ELIPS Studio in Beta 7 release (out today).

Beta 7: contents of ELIPS Studio new release

[LAST MINUTE UPDATE: Mac release won't be available today, we were close, you know like us what a last minute bug means, be patient...]

Android native extensions...now on Mac

The native extension tutorial has been updated for our beloved mac users

You can now virtually do anything on both iPhone and Android, right from your Mac.

Time to replace this wonderful Elips Studio splash screen in your apps...

By very (very) popular request, you can now change your application splash screen! See the UICatalog sample for a small "how to", waiting for a proper tutorial.
This is just a matter of putting a file (ELIPS_Splash_Screen_Portrait.png, and optionally ELIPS_Splash_Screen_Landscape.png) in your resources. This is working on Android and iPhone.

Variant Management: almighty navigation model, now mapped on Android

Beta 6 introduced iPhone navigation model, time for Android to catch-up! Check UICatalog on Android, it feels more and more like a native one. Depending on your devices you will see the same screen transition your have been accustomed to, and if SonyEricsson on an Xperia has done it in a certain way differently from HTC, your app will behave consistently with the native Android applications... and the whole device!

On the road to the commercial release!

For sure we have some fun making this great product but we need to eat at some point :). In this beta7 we are rolling out a part of our license mechanism to be able to stress it big time on the field, to be sure you won't be bothered by it!

The idea here is to introduce an "in-app" login, linked to our server to validate a beta license. If you have already an ELIPS Studio Developer Zone account, simply enter it in the login form displayed when ELIPS Studio is launched:

If you don't have an account already, no problem, simply click on "Create Account" in this form, and you get to this one, allowing you to create your account in few seconds:

Pretty simple no?

To answer some first questions: yes it will work offline, you simply have to activate your license once (this is done online), and you can then code on the plane :); If something is going wrong... it should fallback in all case to a Free License, so you can still work.

Something we missed to communicate was that, for the first commercial launch, only Android and iPhone will be paid platforms, Symbian and WinMob are remaining free to use, we consider those platforms being still beta. Check the updated pricing page.

Other improvements

In addition to the new features described above, we've added an amount of improvements and smaller features, mostly requested by users

You will find a full description in the release notes, here some of the most important ones:

• Native extension improvement: in beta6 we've added a mechanism to get a UView from a UIComponent on iPhone, in order for example to add native iPhone UI components to Flex UI containers... this is now on Android too!
• There is a very minimalist simulator on Mac now, allowing to rotate the screen.
• Build buttons were confusing: now you simply have a "build project for all targets" and a "build project for current device". If native extension are present, they are automatically detected and generated.
• It is now possible, on Android to set the screen orientation

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.

Our next steps!

As you know now, we're reaching the end of our Beta phase, and planning to launch the commercial version this summer... and it should be the next one! So now we are focusing on blocking bugs and crashes to be sure that Android and iPhone are ready for prime time!

One important thing to note is that, once we have launched our commercial version, you will still get regular updates with new features and improvements, keeping the same pace of around 1 release per month. So if you're expecting a feature that is not in the first commercial release, keep synced and watch the next ones, as it is likely to come a little bit later!

- Thomas