Friday, March 7, 2014

LCARS Interface [Windows 8] Release 37 is now available!

Another update to the Windows 8.1 LCARS Interface app should start rolling out to everyone soon! This update brings one of the most requested features...an Image Viewer! It currently supports selection of multiple files, as well as entire folders.  Functionality is very similar to the Document viewer, with a few changes that make sense for the different content.

Also in this update is the ability to add LCARS Interface as the default PDF viewer, so you can launch files straight to the Document Viewer! The same is true for the new Image Viewer as well, which support .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .bmp for now with possibly more formats coming soon.

We also patched up some code that should help the app use less memory and experience significantly less slowdown after prolonged usage and lots of switching between modules. It seemed to improve performance pretty substantially on our 1st generation Surface RT! We've also made several other adjustments and minor fixes to many places in the app. Getting everything to look good and work correctly across such a wide range of device sizes and resolutions is quite a time consuming task, but we're up for the challenge!

We've also been very busy lately adding to our LCARS framework with the Silverlight and WPF ports of our controls. The process is going well and should expand what we are able to do in the future to give you all the capabilities that Windows Store apps are not able to do. The WPF port will allow us to accommodate the many of you who have asked for very specialized applications that don't make sense in the context of the Windows Store application. This could make for some awesome home automation systems!

7 comments:

  1. I'm glad you are using a Surface RT as a benchmark device because I use mine a lot and so I know the app always runs well on my device (and thus even better on newer devices). Keep up the work! I love the app!

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    1. The Surface RT really is a great device, and can be purchased for very reasonable prices these days! The 8.1 update really brought new life to it also, as performance all around seems to have improved on it.

      We try and test everything across a wide spectrum of devices to make sure everything works as expected, but you are correct the Surface RT is the baseline.

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  2. Release 37 seems to have brought some glitches in the red alert animation. Some of the "tiles" down the left flash the non-red alert colour when red alert is running. Looks odd.

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    1. I will start looking into this right away! Thank you for reporting it.

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  3. What is your calculation method for the stardate? Is there a way to change it to be "accurate" to Earth current, instead of a number closer to that of TNG?

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    1. Currently it is using an offset which puts you in an appropriate Star Trek TNG era year. If we adjust it to be accurate to the current year it would give you a negative value, which seemed less appropriate. We could add an option to change that though if it's highly desired.

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