v0.12.0

In this release, we're launching a major redesign of the block-based editor for Wordplay. It breaks convention from other drag-and-drop editors by supporting drag-and-drop, menus, and text editing.

It's not yet perfect — there are things to polish here and there — but it is better than the previous version (in that it's usable), and so we're launching it to get feedback. Tinker with it and see if you can find ways of improving it.

Spit and shine

This was a big week of little things! We added two features:

• Line numbers in the editor. (You can turn them off).
• Allowing + to be a unary operator.

We fixed more than two dozen issues, including:

• Improvements to text cursor placement in localized code
• Control over the language used to evaluate a program
• Improvements to localization of code
• Color accessibility improvements
• Fixed a few cases where projects ended up with the wrong owner
• Improved emoji rendering in Safari
• Improved localized rendering of tooltips

Usability and bug fixes

This week in the slow march toward 1.0:

Features!

• Revised the language's runtime to allow for much more granular evaluation so that animations and random values aren't re-evaluated when an unrelated stream evaluates.

Bug fixes

• The parser will no longer spin out of control (as far as we know)
• Improved the reliability of the Webpage stream
• The read only status and copy project command is now much more obvious for read only projects
• Clarified the editor's mode for viewing localized code

Maintenance

• Integrated Google Translate into our localization process to provide first drafts of locales.

Language bugs squashed

Several language bugs fixed in this release!

Program translation!

In this beta release, we've fixed a few bugs and and added the ability to translate a program into other supported languages. The translation feature uses any translations encoded in the program when available, and when not available, asks Google Translate for a best guess.

Fixes, fixes, fixes

This week we:

• Enabled the Scene stream to support Shape
• Offer conflict resolutions for duplicate names
• Fixed some example code in the docs

New shapes!

This weekend, we polished accessibility, security, and layout, and added to new types of shapes that can be added to a Stage:

• Circle, which takes a radius and a center position
• Polygon, which takes a radius, a center position, and a number of sides

Like Rectangle, both interact with the physics engine, so they can be used to create interesting boundaries of other output to collide with.

Bug fixes!

In this release, we polished many little things:

• Typos in the English tutorial
• Some performance issues on initial page load
• Many editor bugs that caused cursor positioning, selections, and highlighting to be slightly off
• Improvements to spacing in the code examples in the guide
• Improved visual design of toggle buttons and links in the guide
• Additional information about what is at the editor's cursor
• Some background color issues when a tile is in full screen mode

More bug fixes!

This week we worked on several pesky bugs:

• Color emoji weren't rendering in Safari correctly. They are now!
• []•[''] should have been true, but it was false. That's fixed now!
• The type on the Webpage stream was wrong; it's fixed now!
• In the tutorial, the project footer was showing on non-editable output. We hid it.
• The glyphs in project previews weren't properly centered. They are now!
• Instead of using a default tutorial name for tutorial projects, we leave it unset, so that if someone changes a locale, the placeholder change is visible.

Bug fixes

This week we release two fixes!

• Sometimes its nice to work with a lot of data. For example, we saw a 6th grader paste in 10,000 digits of π and then split it into a list of digits. Wordplay was happy to do this, but it was so slow, for really boring reasons. It's much faster now.

• The way that windows in projects were designed was a bit confusing, mostly because it didn't follow conventions. Wordplay's minimize and expand widgets are now much more conventional. We'll save the innovation for other parts of the project.