LCARS Interface for Windows 8.1 (Version 3.0, Release 36) has been Released!

It's finally here! After a month and a half of development, version 3 is now complete and should start rolling out to all of you today.

On the surface it may not look like that much has changed when you first load up the new version. You will notice there is now a PDF reader, which many of you have requested over the past several months! That alone is worth submitting an update for, but there was a whole lot more done than that. Read on for more details on what's new!



By far the largest undertaking of this update was to re-target the project to the Windows 8.1 framework. While that means changing a lot of the code we had already written to accommodate API changes Microsoft is making, they did make some significant improvements that both reduce the complexity of some functions we had, and make it more maintainable in the long run. A lot of things we did that were "workarounds" for issues with the Windows 8 APIs are now gone and so performance and reliability should be improved throughout the app. This will also make it so our app doesn't break whenever Microsoft deprecates the old Windows 8 APIs that it changed entirely, which will likely be in Windows 8.2 or above!

So, while performance improvements and reliability are all well and good, you are likely more interested in what you can see! We've gone through and added new animations all over the app. This includes not just improved transitions, but also more animations that will make the whole interface feel more "alive", as you would expect LCARS to do, even when it is just sitting idle. We initially limited how much of that we put in because of hardware concerns but after extensive testing with our 1st generation Surface RT, which we consider the baseline for Windows 8 hardware, everything seems to work just fine! Everything also runs smoothly on our Intel Atom (Clover Trail) powered tablet as well, so running with full animations on should be possible with most any hardware.  All of our LCARS apps use vector based graphics and hardware accelerated animations, so they should look good and run well on whichever Windows platform you use, be it Windows 8/RT or Windows Phone.

There have also been a bunch of smaller tweaks to the interface. The settings screens have been re-done to look more authentic and there is also a new alert sound you can choose, inspired by the red alert sound on the Enterprise D in Star Trek: Generations. The calculator should now scale better on different resolutions as well. The Atmosphere module has a new display option that should make it easier to see things in your preferred unit system.

We hope you enjoy this update, and as usual we are already starting to plan out the next one!  Please let us know how you like the changes, and keep your feedback coming on what else you would like to see added in the future.

An update to the Windows Phone app will be coming soon as well that incorporates some of the under the hood improvements we made in this update!