Calendar & Small Changes

I've been working a bit with Kapila and Andreas on a Calendar project for Codename One to be used as a cn1lib (working is a strong word I've mostly just bossed them around and didn't really do much, they did all the work). Its a pretty ambitious project since Calendar API's are so fragmented and problematic, in fact no cross platform tool I'm familiar with has anything remotely close to a working Calendar API.
If this is something important/dear to your heart feel free to pitch in and try to improve the implementation, file issues etc.

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Wheel & Drag

In the latest update to desktop builds we made the mouse wheel scroll the UI which is something that we've meant to do for ages but just didn't get around to doing. This will also work in the simulator when the next update arrives.

This was a big challenging to implement properly since the mouse doesn't actually touch a specific component, eventually we decided to just send press/release/drag events in sequence when a mouse wheel is active.

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Desktop, Vision Mobile & Misc Changes

Vision mobile just released their new developer economics study, you can check it out here.

We toggled the new pipeline mode for windows phone to be the default, its clearly the way to go forward in the long run since we just don't have any other choice. All feedback on the new pipeline found it to improve performance significantly and generally reduces some of the paint issues that we run into with Windows Phone. However, there are a couple of reports pointing out that font quality has degraded with the new pipeline. We are looking into this but came to the decision that even if this isn't solvable we will stick with the new pipeline since the old one is just not viable for moving forward.

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A New Pipeline For Windows Phone

The Windows Phone port is one of our most painful ports, the platforms is so fragmented, volatile and rigid its remarkably hard to extract a common porting layer that will satisfy our requirements. We've just updated our servers with the 3rd port we did for Windows Phone, its experimental so its off by default, to activate it just use win.newPipeline=true in your build arguments.

As you may recall our first port targeted Windows Phone 7.5 and used XNA which Microsoft killed with Windows Phone 8.
Our second port was silverlight based and tried to dynamically create a scene-graph structure to match the graphics we are drawing in code, this is a very "imaginative" approach and it worked for most cases but had a lot of issues worst of which was very bad graphics performance and paint artifacts that were very hard to fix.

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Push Notification Tutorial

We've just uploaded a new how do I tutorial for push notification. This tutorial covers the basics and is complementary to the post we published a while back covering push.

A New Pipeline

One of our enterprise developers started complaining about the performance of our Android port, which forced us to take a closer look at our rendering pipeline on Android. It seems that Google’s hardware acceleration broke pretty much all the best practices of the Android 2.x era and what we had wasn’t taking full advantage of “project butter” the codename for Google’s new Android rendering layer.

This took a lot of effort to adapt and the effort is still ongoing but we wrote a brand new rendering layer for Android, at the moment you would need to switch it on explicitly and it will only work for Android 3.x or newer. When we will feel that its stable we will flip the default switch and make this the default for all future Android builds.

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Switching Defaults

As you may know Apple will require that all applications submitted next month would be compiled with XCode 5 and target iOS 7 primarily. We supported this for quite some time however the default was still set to the legacy support first. Today we are deploying an update which will make xcode 5.0 the default and make the theme use iOS 7 theme styling when running on an iOS 7 device.

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