NEW:
Dim Screen Verb to perform a gamma fade on any or all attached screens. Useful for adjusting the brightness of an attached monitor or blanking the screen entirely. (note that the
rate parameter to the verb is not yet implemented. The screen will always immediately switch to the new value. I’ll sort that out in the next build.)
NEW:
Base64 Encode New verb to encode binary or other data with base64 encoding.
DIY Plugin: The new DIY plugin now calls the unit handlers in it’s Interface script as the old one did.
DIY Plugin: Note that the timing of when the data available event fires may be different for the new plugin compared to the old one. If you were relying on the event to fire only once for a line or packet it may now fire more than once unless you use the parsing options to properly break up the packets.
FIX: A regression in the last version caused Interface scripts to be overwritten with their empty template when opening the edit window for them. (the work around was to use the previous version popup to restore the source from the last successful compile and then edit and save that again) this is now working normally again.
FIX: A regression in the last version caused the Say and Speak verbs default “wait” parameter to default to false instead of true and so unless you specifically added “with waiting” they would speak over each other if more than one was called at a time. This is now fixed.
FIX: Deleting an Interface script no longer leaves the folder in the database behind causing confusion later when creating a new one.
FIX: New DIY plugin no longer requires Python3 to be installed
FIX: New DIY plugin no longer throws errors when receiving binary data that is non-UTF formatted.
FIX: The new Hue plugin no longer prints constant errors to the log if you have a sensor or other unknown device configured for it.
FIX: The new Arduino plugin now recognizes negative numbers as numbers and will probably set the value of the unit to them and no longer set them to the Description of the unit as it did previously.
FIX: The new Arduino plugin now properly routes all types of commands to the Units. Previously some received or sending commands could get lost due to a different address prefix in one place vs the other.
FIX: The Switchbot plugin will now again perform a scan for switchbots. This fix was in the plugin
API to do a non-case sensitive search for the appropriate handler so this may fix some potential problems in other plugins as well.
FIX: The new VeraUI7 plugin will now properly update the House Mode unit in XTension when the house mode is changed in the Vera.
PLUGINS: The standard python includes will now automatically create the correct type of connection be it a TCP or a Serial connection simplifying the creation of new plugins that use the built in connection class.
PLUGINS: Normally any output to stdout or stderr will be logged as if it came from the write log command. There are some libraries or functions that will always print to stdout or stderr and you may not always be interested in this. The plugin
API has a new key to tell it to ignore the std pipes for logging to suppress some of the log spamming we were seeing specifically with the tp-link plugin. If the plugin is placed in debug mode all the logging will be done normally as before to aid in seeing the errors or information.
Please also remember that the original Arduino, Hue, Barix, Vera and w800 plugins are no longer included in the build. They have been replaced with new Catalina compatible plugins. If you haven’t already converted your interfaces to the new plugins simply go to the interface list window and edit those interfaces selecting the proper new plugin from the list and then enable them. These plugins have been around long enough that I consider them to be fully functional but if you have problems with the conversion let me know. Internally to XTension the older plugins will still work fine so if it is necessary you can pull the plugins out of the previous release and then use the “install plugin” menu under the Database menu to re-install them in this version. They will not run under Catalina going forward so it is important to get switched to the new ones at some point.