NOTE
This announcement is being made on the English, Spanish, French and Italian communities. While I have a passing grasp of each of those languages, an individual translated announcement would test my sanity, so I hope I don’t offend anyone but this is going in English everywhere.
iFrotz 1.7.1 to hit the AppStore in roughly 11 days
I’ve had the serious pleasure of helping Craigh Smith, who maintains iFrotz, with its development: i.e., I’ve been playing tons of games and making tons of feature requests and filing tons of bug fixes. I think it should be public knowledge that Mr. Smith is the dream of every software user: he has graciously listened to everything I ever had to say and has fixed the vast, vast majority of the bugs I found; left a small sample for later; and we both agreed that a few fringe cases were simply not possible at this time.
My iOS device is an iPod Touch. I can assure you that in iFrotz, in its current incarnation, it’s no hardship at all.
Here are some of the new features and fixes:
- Pinch to increase/decrease text size, including the status bar;
- Bug fix: status bar and quote boxes got cropped sometimes;
- Search bar now included, in case you have a huge database of games like yours truly;
- RECORD/PLAY commands now available, mostly for the sake of Endless, Nameless;
- Hyperlinks fixed;
- Pinch to zoom graphic windows (just the actual graphic; the window remains the same size);
- SuperGlus, Glus, and PapuaGlus, and I-Don’t-Know-What-Else-Glus, now fully supported barring any unexpected development. Very many games tested to ensure this;
- Autocomplete now uses the game’s disctionary, making it game-specific and international;
- Various Glk bugs fixed;
- Fail-Safe quote bug fixed;
- Accented and extended characters displayed as “?” in the text, status bar and quote boxed: fixed;
- Two-finger tap to emulate ESC, due to new games having a menu system that requires it;
- The Help menu in some games crashed iFrotz this is also now fixed;
- Increased maximum font size;
- Various bug fixes (example: in Diana and La Vita? Non Parlatemi De La Vita a typewriter effect made iFrotz crash. No more)
The only thing still missing from iFrotz that would make it at least as good as a desktop interpreter is that it doesn’t play sound yet. There are also still some individual issues with some individual games, but due to Craig Smith’s incessant efforts (which will now, for the sake of his sanity, go on a little break) the list has been dwindling away.
I encourage you to make suggestions and bug report here: code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/issues/list. Craig Smith WILL pay attention to them, and will be glad for your feedback.
Peter Pears