Differences

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--- current [2020/03/22 15:45] – 9.4.28 James Sentman
+++ current [2023/12/21 17:17] – [9.5.4 Change Log:] James Sentman
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-=====XTension Version 9.4.28=====
+=====Download XTension 9.5.4=====
-Released: 3/22/2020\\
-\\
+Released 12/19/2023\\
-Download for Mohave and Earlier: [[https://www.machomeautomation.com/files/xtension/xtension_9.4.28.zip|XTension v9.4.28 (build 1019) 3/22/2020]]\\
-Download for Catalina Only: [[https://www.machomeautomation.com/files/xtension/xtension_9.4.28.dmg|XTension v9.4.28 (build 1019) for Catalina Only 3/22/2020]]\\
 \\
-**NOTE: the catalina download is a notarized disk image file but does not contain the entirety of the plugins as not all are updated to run on Catalina yet. See the Catalina note below or more info. Please do not use this image on a 10.14 (Mohave) or earlier version, use the zip file above.**
+Download Universal Binary for all Supported OS versions; [[https://www.machomeautomation.com/files/xtension/xtension_9_5_4.dmg|XTension. v 9.5.4 (build 1085)]]\\
+**This is an important update for NGROK users.** This updates the ngrok client to support the system changes they are making live. The older version will no longer be supported very soon. Anyone using ngrok tunnels should definitely perform this upgrade as soon as possible.
-====Important Info====
+**Minimum System Version** for this release is OSX 10.10 but not all plugins will function properly prior to 10.13. Please start the necessary work to upgrade to at least 10.13 or recommended 10.15 or newer. At some point in the near future it will no longer be possible for me to support anything prior to 10.13 and the video plugins will never work prior to Catalina.
-**Minimum System Version** for this release is OSX 10.10\\
-\\
-**Mac OSX Catalina** As of this moment I do not recommend that anyone update to OSX Catalina. Changes in Catalina have disabled several of the older plugins and the newer ones are not fully tested with it yet. As of this moment I do not recommend running Catalina on your house server. I don’t see any advantages and there are many potential issues not just with XTension. I can provide an Apple notarized DMG file of the subset of plugins that do work properly if this is something that you need. Otherwise do not update to Catalina yet for your house server.\\
-\\
-**Mac OSX Mojave** has changed the requirements for scripting of other applications. You MUST force any script to run that contacts a different application when you upgrade and click “OK” when it asks for permission or your scripts will silently fail when they run later. See the [[tech_notes:mojave|Mojave Support Page]] for more info.\\
+**Rosetta Note:** While the entirety of the main app and all more recent plugins are Universal and run natively on Intel or Apple Silicon there are a few older plugins including the W800 and CM11 that are still Intel only. They run fine under Rosetta and you’ll never notice the difference. The only issue is that Rosetta is not included by default on the new Apple Silicon Macs. You’ll need to first run any Intel app, or do a get info on any app at all and select “open using Rosetta” then the OS will tell you that you need Rosetta and would you like to install it now. Once you complete that those plugins will run normally.
+====9.5.4 Change Log:====
-====9.4.28 Change Log====
+  * The [[supported_hardware:hue|Phillips Hue]] plugin now properly supports non-dimmable plug in modules.
-  * NEW: The Return Of Alexa! This version has newer plugin versions that can get around the recent changes that Amazon added to their Alexa firmware. **There are several install requirements and configuration changes that are necessary before they will run.** Please have a look at the the [[supported_hardware:alexa|Original Alexa Plugin page]] and the new [[supported_hardware:alexasudo|Alexa Sudo page]]. The changes from Amazon make it impossible to run more than one instance of an Alexa plugin on the same machine and so I have also [[supported_hardware:alexapi|ported the code to the Raspberry pi]] so that you can run as many on those devices as necessary if you need to share more than the allowed 20 unit limit.
+  * Fixed a problem with the [[supported_hardware:wiz|Wiz plugin]] that would log errors as the libraries now return the name of the scene rather than it’s ID as they did previously.
-  * NEW: The first pass at a Catalina capable RFX plugin for the newer RFX devices. This plugin is in alpha at the moment and incomplete. It does not try to transmit and does not yet support the lighting device types. It is limited to receiving the receive only sensors from Oregon and others. Please do not actually convert your existing plugin to this yet as things may change. Please do disable the current plugin and create a new one using the new plugin to test it. See if the devices you have are properly received and that new units are created in XTension. If you see any errors in the log when receiving them please forward those log entries to me. If you have other problems please also email me that. I will be adding support for the lighting and other transmit capable devices soon.
+  * Fixed the error that was logged while trying to create a symlink to the internal python version if you did not have a /usr/local/bin folder on your machine.
-  * NEW: Added the [[supported_hardware:serverevents|Server Events plugin]] for receiving unit updates or events from a standard HTTP Server Events Stream.
+  * The python symlink is now created inside the XTension Support folder “pythonxt” and you can use that to run python scripts inside XTension or from elsewhere but using the XTension settings. It is especially useful if you are running python scripts from an async shell script in XTension as they will inherit all the path info to run properly where running the built in python may cause errors.
-  * Icons in the Select Unit Icon window are now always presented in alphabetical order.
+  * NEW: Added an option to delay quitting. This will popup a window asking if you really meant to quit, stopping accidental shutdown of the entire program due to misplaced fingers. The window will count down for 30 seconds and then quit the app. This window does not come up if the system tells XTension to quit as if before a restart or something similar. Find the checkbox to turn it on in the Preferences.
-  * FIX: The [[supported_hardware:tplink|TP-Link plugin]] now better recovers from a connection error or a refused connection to devices that might refuse a connection once in a while due to their own internal issues or dropping temporarily off wifi. It is still a little chatty with error messages while this happens as I’m still collecting more info to fully understand why they sometimes refuse connections while everything appears to be working fine. I will reduce the logging in a future version.
+  * NEW: Added the option to send a value of 0 for a dimmable Unit to the On script if there is no Off script. Normally a value of 0 for any dimmable unit will be sent to the Off script rather than the On script. Unless there is no off script. This meant that previously you potentially had to duplicate some of your logic for handling values in the On and Off script. When this is turned on in the Preference, and a Unit has no Off script. The On script will be run instead with the future value set to 0. This is on by default, but if it causes you issues with some of your scripting you can turn it off in the preferences window.
-  * FIX: The xBee plugin will not get shutdown for failing to return pings on very quite networks. Previously if you didn’t receive or send at least some command every few minutes XTension would think the interface had hung up and would restart it.
+  * Fixed the incorrect link to the mailing list signup page in the purchase dialog.
-  * FIX: Fixed a problem that cause the master log window to not be restored if you had quit the program with a log filter set to an interface or plugin instance.
+  * Removed some debug logging I failed to remove before the last release. This was in the conversion of potentially confused strings into floats and so did not affect every plugin, but might have logged confusing information occationally.
-  * FIX: Fixed a timing problem with the [[supported_hardware:databasesharing|Shared Databases]] new 2 way sharing of Unit Properties that could cause changes to bounce back and forth forever if you changed a unit property and then changed it again before the ack had bounced back to the originating server.
+  * There was a change in AppleScript support in OS versions from Ventura on that would actually enforce some, but not all, of the scripting dictionary flags that have never, in the entire history of the Mac, mattered. So us developers got sloppy and failed to add things like the “optional” flag to all the verbs reliably. The first I’ve found and fixed was with the Speak verb where it would tell you that the “in” parameter was required. It is no longer required. So far I have not found any other such issues and a visual search through the dictionary did not reveal any more such issues, but it’s entirely possible there are more parameters that are not properly marked as optional. If you find any such errors please let me know.
-  * FIX: Another issue with shared databases if you set a unit property from the on propertyChanged event those messages could also bounce back and forth forever. This is now properly supported.
+  * The Interface list window can now be sorted by CPU Usage, Memory Usage and Process ID. This only works if you have the “show more information” option turned on in the gear menu on the window. This can be a great aide in finding the plugin process that is eating up all your CPU or memory and linking a python process shown in the Activity Monitor to the plugin it’s actually running. They all just say “python” in the monitor. But now it’s easier to find the PID number in the list if you sort by it.
-  * FIX: Fixed a problem in the [[supported_hardware:hue|Hue plugin]] that would cause many errors to be written to the log if a remote control device or keypad was not fully configured and was returning invalid button numbers.
+  * Updated the [[xtension_manual:ngrok|ngrok client]] version to 3.5. This is an important update if you are using this service as the old version will no longer be supported sometime in January. There were many changes to the usage of the client, and many more to the layout of the configuration file. I believe I have them all sorted out, but if you have issues let me know. All output from the client is logged during startup so you can check immediately if it thinks it started the tunnels or if it logged errors instead.
-  * FIX: Fixed a problem in the [[supported_hardware:hue|Hue plugin]] that could cause it to stop receiving changes to lights made from other clients of the hue hub. The polling of both lights and sensors should be reliable now. Additionally the last beta version still had the problem with sensors not being reliably polled. This is fixed for the release version.
+  * I had previously hidden some of the lower level debugging aids in the contextual menus by having people hold the option key while right clicking. There is really no need for this extra step so I removed it. The Contextual menus for Units and Interfaces will have their “log debug data” and “Reveal in Finder” options at the bottom of all the contextual menus for them. This will make it easier to collect info for me if things start behaving oddly.
-  * FIX: In all plugin configuration and unit configuration windows and dialogs the tab order of controls will be correct, or at least sensible, regardless of the order they are created in within the plugin configuration files. Some of the plugin setup windows were actually tabbing backwards which has always driven me crazy but I’ve never gotten motivated to fix. If you see windows in XTension that still have incorrect or non-sensical tab order please let me know.
+  * I added the same debug logging info to the contextual menus of global scripts should it ever be necessary to get a look at that.
-  * FIX: Fixed a potential issue with sending emails that could cause timeouts to be logged instead of the email being sent.
+  * To that debug output I added another line of info comparing the length of the Unit Address in both bytes and glyphs. This might be helpful to more easily discover if a plugin or a bug somewhere has inserted invisible characters into the Address field of a Unit causing things to get disconnected in the database and potentially making more and more units being created when there really should be only the one.
-  * FIX: Fixed a minor issue where the transmitted packet count was not updated for a shared database connection.
+  * There were some significant updates and improvements in the main program libraries that will make many things run faster and smoother. So far my testing of all of them work just fine. They aren’t a thing I can turn off though, they are just part of the latest compiler update. It will depend on what you’re doing, how busy your machine is and how fast it is in general whether you’ll see any difference at all. Usually the things they improved aren’t an issue until you’re doing something many times in a row. So I expect that the main improvements will be in window redrawing and things like that, but if you have a machine that is very busy it may improve that somewhat throughout.
-  * Added support for radio button groups in the plugin configuration windows.
-  * Added support for the barometer/temperature/humidity Oregon combo units to the Legacy RFX device plugin. The nomenclature for these is confusing and when I move all the existing RFX plugins to legacy status it will be more clear. Here I mean the currently supported plugin for the older RFX devices which was not able to receive these particular sensors.
-  * Changed the plugin interface for the current RFX plugin for the legacy RFX devices to not offer to receive the newer RFX device protocol. The two devices are now served by 2 separate plugin.
-  * Added the ability for a custom column in a unit list to also look into the lower level database of the unit for it’s value. You just need to use the actual database key rather than the name of a unit property. This will be of limited usefulness to the majority of you but has already come in handy for me in debugging things.
+-----
+NOTE: This disk image no longer includes the older legacy plugins that will not be updated for newer OS versions. If you still need to run the [[supported_hardware:cm19]], [[supported_hardware:cm15a]], [[supported_hardware:zwave]] or the various Smarthome X10 interfaces please download [[tech_notes:catalina|the legacy plugins package from here]] and install the ones you need via the “Install Plugin” menu item of the “Database” menu.
 =====Previous Releases=====
 {{indexmenu>:current#2|js#doku}}
-=== Older Versions ===
-[[beta|The Changelog and Download links for builds between 763 and version 9.1 can be found here]]