Every developer knows the feeling. You've got to update your product, but even a tiny change can break something quite unexpectedly. You work thoroughly through existing code and fix the bugs that have been reported, have ideas how to optimize things and do test runs. Did you really take enough care nothing broke? It's a stressful time, and sometimes you wonder why on earth you started this in the first place.
Add a magnitude of 100 to the excitement when you change the name of the product. :-) arcadeEngines latest incarnation has a new name: it is now to be known as animationEngine. Finally it is done. animationEngine 2.1 has been released.
You might ask: "Why the name change?" Well, I must admit I liked the name arcadeEngine. I really did. However given the user feedback it turned out that the name was misleading. Today AE is used in games, but also in a variety of stacks that are not at all game related. Users do things I never imagined, when I originally wrote the library. They spice up their UIs with beautiful animations, create presentations that feature animation rich content and all sorts of other interesting stuff. So the name animationEngine describes the purpose of the library a bit better. Why did it take so long to just change the name? Well, it's just not that easy. As written above, I needed to be very careful with the update, to make sure the transition to the new library is as painless as possible for existing users. I think I succeeded. :-) I certainly hope so!
As a special bonus I added a nice handler that allows proportional growing and shrinking of styled text. If you have a text field containing different textsizes, you can now grow or shrink the text, keeping the relation of sizes intact. Also the documentation was improved to eliminate some usability issues. All known bugs have been fixed in both the library and the documentation. And the best thing is: The cross grade is free for all existing arcadeEngine 2.x license holders. If you hold a current license of arcadeEngine, all you will need to do is enter your license code in the new library and go ahead and use it.
As some of you may know, I won the MacMini coding competition with a game called bugAboo, that is available as a free download (see last issue of the newsletter for details). So as an extra you will get the source code of that game if you buy an AE license before Dec. 31st 2006. You get a full blown game stack starring AE for you to tear apart and play around with. You already hold a current AE license? I won't let you stand in the cold! Just email info@derbrill.de before December 31st and request a download link. Until next time and keep on Revvin!
Malte
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