Over the past week and a half, I have made releases for all of my projects. Most of them were pretty minor, and just amounted to updating the translations (and fixing an issue where the Qt-supplied translations were not being properly loaded). Packagers will now need to depend on lrelease, because I no longer include the precompiled binary .qm files.

The projects with actual feature releases were CuteMaze, Hexalate, Tanglet, and Tetzle. For the most part, the features added will not be obvious unless you have a 4K monitor, because the biggest thing I added was support for high-DPI displays. I did also finish moving my projects to be Qt 5 only, and to use C++11.

As usual, report any issues you have. Enjoy!

Kapow

I have released a minor update to Kapow, version 1.4.4. This release is mostly to add an automatic backup system for the time data that I have been working on. A few users have experienced data loss, and this will hopefully prevent anybody else suffering that. Kapow now makes logarithmic backups (one backup a day for a week, then one backup a week for a month, then one backup a month for a year, and finally one backup a year after that) as well as a temporary backup that gets overwritten with each save. This release also adds support for building with Qt 5, although it is still released with Qt 4 as that is the primary development platform for now.

Longer term I am planning on making it easier for users to store the data file and backups in a location of their choosing, which will default to their documents folder. I have not settled on how I want to expose it in the interface (although you can already do this by using passing an XML file to the program).

Hexalate, Peg-E, and Simsu

I have also made a few other minor releases (Hexalate 1.0.2, Peg-E 1.1.2, and Simsu 1.2.3) over the past two weeks that I have not felt justify a blog post on their own. These releases mainly just add translations and support for building with Qt 5. I plan on making minor releases of the rest of my programs over the next few weeks to also update their translations, and to add support for building with Qt 5.

I should have announced this sooner, but better late than never I suppose. I will no longer be creating new PowerPC builds of my programs. There are many reasons, but the biggest two are that my iBook G3 finally gave up the ghost, and that Qt has dropped support for PowerPC. I know that this is an inconvenience for some of my users, and I am sorry about that. Still, I hung in there as long as I could, but Apple has moved on.

I released Simsu 1.2.0 today. It all started innocently enough. Just a few tweaks to the interface, which ended up as a new layout so that it looks good maximized on widescreen displays. Before I knew it, I had replaced the solution generator because it was just too slow. And then added an easier puzzle solver based on the original puzzle generator. From there I decided it would be nice to support all of the different types of symmetry. I stopped myself before I could do anything else. Who knows what the future will hold for my “basic” Sudoku game? 😛

I took another small break from my current projects and made some improvements to Simsu. Upon request, I added a row of number entry buttons so that it would be easier to play on a touchscreen device. Inspired by this change, I modified the interface to mimic KSudoku’s behavior: left-clicking a cell toggles the values, and right-clicking a cell toggles the notes. I also added the option to highlight all instances of a number. Last but not least, I added undo/redo support*. Enjoy!

*Because of this addition, old saves will no longer work. You should finish whatever game you are playing before you upgrade.