Any ETA(s) for the IDEs?

The “Inform 7 documentation and resources” thread still mentions the release of the Inform 7 IDEs as being for the week of 16th May. As that’s been and gone, are there any updated ETAs for them or is it a case of “released when ready”?

1 Like

There’s a beta for linux (see Beta release of Inform App for Linux ) which works pretty well. I haven’t seen anything about the others (but I don’t use those so I also haven’t really lookd). I expect it’s going to be “released when ready” though.

2 Likes

I know that David Kinder, the developer of the Windows version has had some activity on GitHub, every few days with some change or another. I’m not all that good at understanding what’s being done but I know that progress is being made.

Most of the Mac inform 7 repository hasn’t been updated in a long while though, so if Toby Nelson is working on it, it’s not on GitHub.

2 Likes

Yeah, the Linux version is the one I’m using. Hopefully the Mac version catches up, wonder if that’s what is causing the delay.

As is more or less tradition, I’m afraid. The GitHub repo has only ever really been updated with releases, active development seems to be happening in private.

So I guess with Mac we’ll just have to wait and see.

Though I’d hoped that, with the move toward open source, maybe we’d see more activity with all the IDEs.

Not really Inform v10-related, but this guy has done a ton of work on the Inform macOS IDE and its internal Zoom interpreter. Hopefully some of it can be merged back into the official IDE.

1 Like

As I look at the new i7 v 10 software, I am amazed at its complexity. Way above my pay grade.

It is no wonder it took so long in development! I can also understand the time needed to develop the IDEs.

I suspect that that really does count as v10 related: you can see that the lion’s share of the work happened in a bolus last November and December. And that there are commits about changing the specific colors of UI elements and reducing images’ size… a lot of detail that doesn’t seem like someone scratching their own itch. Almost exactly what it would look like if someone in mid-2021 aspired to release a new version of Inform at the end of April and sought out someone to update the Mac IDE in the appropriate time frame.

I knew about the end of April being Inform’s birthday and Dr. Nelson’s predilection to release Inform’s milestones then – Inform 7’s original announcement:

“The Inform design system for interactive fiction made its first appearance […] with the release of Inform 1 on 30 April 1993. Three years of rapid development followed until, with a
top-to-bottom code rewrite, the release of Inform 6 on 30 April 1996 became definitive. […] The Public Beta of Inform7 is released today.”

And in mid-March, the Linux IDE release candidate came out after a year of quiet. So at the end of March I went snooping around github regarding the other IDEs and saw this Mac IDE work and saw that the Windows IDE had also had some highly specific UI changes in November that seemed to parallel some of the Mac changes. So I knew it was coming. And it was killing me to keep my yap shut during April. I tweet about Inform 7 every weekday, fer cripes sake!

2 Likes

So perhaps this new person is the one thats making the new Mac IDE for v10?

Time to follow his github!

I’ll be honest and say that I started resuming the Linux IDE work at the end of 2021, before I knew something was coming, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to aim for the end of April in case something did. In the worst case, I’d end up having finished the work I had already promised to do for years. :smile:

6 Likes

Central to my deduction was that the IDE maintainers must have been in on the schedule. So maybe I was more lucky than clever here!

Well, you guessed right that that was the reason I did a beta in mid-March.

1 Like

The Windows front-end is basically ready to ship, but there doesn’t seem much point right now as the bug fixes in the compiler are still coming every day or two.

5 Likes

Maybe look at how other software projects handle it, e.g. Godot?

Out of curiosity, will the Linux CLI written in Perl be updated too? It’s less useful now since the compiler command-line usage is documented, so it’s easier tha before to use it directly.

Just asking, actually I’m not a Linux user, but I’ve always wondered if there were many users of that Perl script.

1 Like

Bump! :slight_smile:

Sorry to pester, but I’m planning on entering my Inform adventure into IFComp this year and I’m wondering whether I’ll be building it using the latest version (and I’m very IDE bound).

Cheers

Richard

2 Likes

Also a bump from me :slight_smile: I agree with the poster above - I’m also very IDE bound, and would love to use the new Inform version with the Windows IDE - any thoughts on when this would be possible?

Thanks!

3 Likes

I would suggest don’t hold up your project waiting for the new IDE - especially if you’re entering IFComp. Even if it is released soon, probably the last thing you want to do is switch versions close to the deadline and risk everything crashing and burning when the clock is ticking.

3 Likes