I was busier than I expected to be in January, so the annual maintenance releases I make for my programs slipped into February. And along with the bugfixes, I actually made two minor feature releases! They are not huge releases, but I did add some features to FocusWriter and Kapow. Enjoy!

I was recently made aware of a bug in Tetzle that has apparently been there from the beginning: alt-tabbing to a different program would break interaction with the game board. I hadn’t noticed because I almost never use alt-tab to switch between programs. 😉

While fixing that bug, I discovered that several other keyboard interactions with the game board were also glitchy. It even did not automatically snap pieces when moving them by they keyboard! That was added to mouse-only play back in 2008, so these are some longstanding bugs. I guess not many people play Tetzle with the keyboard?

I am much happier with the code now, and I think I have sorted out all of the bugs with the keyboard play. Enjoy!

I really did not expect to be making releases of my programs anytime soon, but things come up. First somebody reported a crash in Tetzle when attaching multiple pieces, then somebody else reported that player names were messed up in the high scores dialogs of my games under Windows, and finally the tool I used to update the Linux desktop integration files is unmaintained and broken so I needed to replace my use of that. Oh, and Whisker Menu did not show up in the right location when using multiple monitors under Wayland. Whew. I think that covers everything! I doubt most users will notice a difference—although packagers will need to add gettext as build dependency—but enjoy the new updates! And now I am going to take a break for a while… I hope. 😉

As has become my habit for January, I made a maintenance release of my programs. For the most part there aren’t any user-visible changes, but I did fix a bug in Simsu (the game was really wide when first launched) and I updated the translations. A few days ago I also made a Whisker Menu release, and that had some bug fixes in it. Enjoy!

A user recently informed me of an issue with the Windows release of Tetzle: there were missing DLLs that prevented Tetzle from running! Interestingly, the builds ran on my computers without a hitch so when I had tested them before making the release I didn’t notice the issue. I have uploaded new builds of Tetzle 3.0 for Windows, so the issue has been solved.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that the windeployqt.exe executable from the binary release of Qt 6.7.2 apparently thinks everything is compiled with MSVC instead of MinGW. 🤦 Which means that when it went looking for the compiler runtime libraries—libstdc++-6.dll, etc—it couldn’t find the correct ones.

I solved this by grabbing the windeployqt.exe executable from an earlier Qt binary release and used the qtpaths.exe executable from Qt 6.7.2 so that it would find the correct libraries and plugins, and everything was fine. I suppose I could have just copied the few missing DLLs by hand this time, but now I have everything set up so that I can avoid this issue in the future.

This shows how important it is to inform me of issues: if I don’t know about them, I can’t fix them! Don’t assume somebody has already reported it. 🙂