What's coming in TcMenu 4.2

[davetcc]

Just so everyone understands what's happening, TcMenu 4.2 is an incremental update, but it has a couple of quite major changes that will come as part of it. This will be along side the bug fixes from discussions / issue tracking. So if you look at the repo, and wonder where EmbedControlFX has gone, it's been merged into tcMenu Designer!

1. Designer

A long-standing missing feature is to be able to open more than one menu at once, this is now implemented, using the new project option opens a new window.

2.Embed Control

For Developers: What was EmbedControlFx will be built directly into the designer, it is focused on developers who wish to remotely connect with devices, and potentially set up forms for both mobile and desktop use. There's a new EmbedControl menu available directly from designer.

For End users: A new flutter application has been written that works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS. It is in testing now and has been tested to some extent on everything except Linux. This is considered the "End User" version of the app and will be shipped into the respective stores. Screenshots are included below to give an idea of how it will look.

[davetcc]

The user-centric/mobile app is coming along nicely now and is slowly heading toward something releasable. This shows what the mobile UI can look like with a form designed in the new form designer that's part of Embed Control 4.2:

Here's a preview of the form editor where the layouts like the one above can be :

On the library front:

I am now trying to fix the few last rendering issues that remain in 4.2, these seem to revolve around title widgets not always updating as expected, and also an issue with custom keyboard support.

There is also another issue that I am looking into where incomplete remote update messages are being sent as items are being activated on the menu display. These will all be fixed before 4.2 is released.

[davetcc]

And once this is done, a lot of the groundwork for the form editor will make it very easy to apply the same to themes in the embedded domain, In the long term, I think there's room for a dashboard and theme editor based on this idea.

[davetcc]

As an update, I'm now on the closing straight for 4.2, one more fix left in the libraries and then a full test cycle. The libraries are backward compatible so will go first.

Following this the new designer will be released, it is mainly incremental but includes a much-improved embed control form designer.

Lastly, a release candidate of Embed Control will be released slowly, built on Flutter it now has about 80-90% of the functionality from the desktop version. This is not a developer tool, and as such will be released into stores, starting with Windows, then macOS and iOS, and lastly Android.