Linkage 3.8 Released

Linkage 3.8.1 is the current version as of this post. It is no longer a Beta test.

Warning: The “Connect” feature is now called “Link” and the “L” button will do what he “C” button did before. I left the “C” button doing the same thing to help people with the change, and because making it do other things would be very very bad!

What else did I do to to change this version? Here’s a list of the changes I’ve made over the last five months, roughly in backwards order:

• Change to use 3 decimal places of precision instead of 4. I did this because I don’t have calipers that measure ten-thousandths so why show the extra digit!
• Added hull/polygon/polyline selection for drawing elements. This gives more options for drawing stuff. I hope to add curves to the drawing elements sometime.
• Changed "Connector" to "Link" and changed the "L" shortcut to be the shortcut for the "Link" operation (still worded as "connect" in the code for now.
• Fixed "Combine" code so it’s available at the correct times. It still doesn’t work in certain situations and I’ll try to fix it when I can. It really needs to handle the few combining situations that the “link” feature doesn’t handle or handles differently.
• Fixes to the File menu button. The button had a tiny image due to some badly written library code from MS (not really their fault since there were no UDH displays when they wrote it). Now it has the word “File” and is the correct size.
• Fixed video encoding problem where first second of video was skipped/black/weird. This was due to not specifying keyframe for the first frame (I had assumed the codec would do that). This may have happened only with certain codecs like the x264 codec that I use.
• Fixed bug in element selection code that caused it to fail to select previously selected elements due to thinking all elements had a control knob.
• Improved link-to-link simulation error checking where some links got stretched before.
• Fixed code to properly return control knob count and not let the view window determine when control knobs are drawn.
• Added debug item to show bad link when link mangling (stretch or compress) occurs. Yep, this was just for me.
• Fix to control knob initialization for drawing circles.
• Don’t do auto-join if elements not moved far enough to drag. Otherwise, just clicking on overlapping connectors would join them.
• Added support for ctrl-shift-click for selecting buried elements (those under others).
• Selection dialog box now shows measurements as the labels for measurement lines.
• Fixed bug dragging slider at end of locked link.
• Added offset feature to measurement lines.
• Added feature to automatically fasten measurement lines to selected connectors, if possible. Drop a measurement line in while two connectors are selected and the ends of the measurement are places on the connectors and fastened to them in case they move.
• Fixed print preview problem when clicking the window close button. There was a huge hang problem.
• Slightly better zoom to fit functionality for screen, printing, and image creation. Needs additional work for iterative situations.
• Improvements to actual size printing. Page numbers on printed pages (but they get cut off right now).
• Fixed bug in graham algorithm (duplicate removal and sorting problems). This caused the hull shape of some links to become incorrect and weird.
• Move all mechanism editor shortcuts to the mechanism code so they don’t happen when the user edits coordinates in the toolbar.
• Added 32 and 64-bit notation to the version number in the "about" box.
• Change angle display to be 0 to 359.99999 and not use negatives for the second 180 degrees. This makes the numbers match the angle hint curve that is displayed in the window when three connectors are selected.
• Updated the documentation to show the new "angle", "distance", etc., text info in the tool bar.
• Changed connector properties dialog to use a different parsing function for doubles since there may have been a Windows XP bug causing parsing errors.
• Change to dim the mechanism when mechanism editing is disabled using the checkbox in the edit panel of the tool bar. Accidentally selecting this could be causing problems somehow.
• Change status bar to show stretch and rotate info of selections, not just mouse coordinates.
• Partial change to show descriptive text under the text box in the Dimension panel.