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current [2019/06/08 10:59] – added slow polling option James Sentmancurrent [2024/02/05 17:53] (current) – James Sentman
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-=====XTension Version 9.4.19===== +=====Download XTension 9.5.4===== 
-Released: 6/8/2019\\ + 
-\\ +>2/5/2024 [[current:beta|XTension 9.5.5 Beta 1]] is available. 
-Download: [[http://www.machomeautomation.com/files/xtension/xtension_1003.zip|XTension v9.4.19 (build 1003) 6/8/2019]]\\ + 
-zipfile md5 = [[tech_notes:md5|15850c3f2839d10b207cfdb8cea82071]]\\+Released 12/19/2023\\
 \\ \\
-\\ +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)]]\\
-**NOTE** as of version 9.4.13 the minimum system version has increased to 10.10\\ +
-Before upgrading to OSX Mojave please read the [[tech_notes:mojave|Mojave Support Page]].\\ +
-\\ +
-If you have already upgraded to Mojave and have any scripts that reference applications other than XTension you must run them after the upgrade. The OS cancels your previous permissions to control other apps when the version info changes. If you don’t run those scripts and OK the dialog that will appear then ay scripts you have that try to do this will not run. \\ +
-\\ +
-====Change Log====+
  
-  * FIX: a problem with the new Hue plugin on systems that use a comma as a decimal point. +**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.
-  * FIX: APC UPS monitor plugin is better at reconnecting after certain kinds of temporary networking errors. +
-  * FIX: The background database save had very rarely caused a complete hang for some people. This is now fixed. +
-  * Change: The “High Sierra” fix for applications being hung when the screen goes to sleep is no longer applied if you’re running Mojave or newer. I believe that Apple has fixed this so it’s no longer necessary. It caused no problems just wasted some CPU and memory. +
-  * FIX: The new Hue plugin no longer sends constant updates every few seconds if you have any sensors or remotes on your ZigBee network. +
-  * FIX: In the new Hue plugin battery operated sensors and remotes now properly display their battery level. +
-  * FIX: The new Barix plugin is better able to cope with unicode characters in unit names. +
-  * FIX: Rarely the entire application could crash when closing a window. This was a bug in the compiler framework which I have added a work around for.  +
-  * Change: The new plugin include code has been significantly updated to properly handle unicode encoding in both python 2.7 and python 3 plugins. Some individual plugins may still have issues. +
-  * FIX: The new W800 plugin will fix at first startup any security units that were not properly converted from a previous attempt to convert. All W800 units are now working with the new plugin. If you had trouble with the one in the last release please try again. +
-  * FIX: Creating a new Global Script and then closing the Edit Script window before typing anything now properly removes the name from the index. Previously you could not attempt to create another script by that same name until you quit and restart. This is now fixed. +
-  * Change: The entirety of the plugin includes has much improved error reporting showing not just the error as before but a stack trace showing exactly where in the plugin the error occurred. This will make future debugging and development of plugins that much easier.+
  
-The following fixes are based on reports from the Beta release and were not included in the Beta version. I updated the build version between the beta and the release so XTension will still make a database backup even if you are running the beta currently. You are always encouraged to zip up an extra copy in the Finder between closing the old version and first running the new version however.+**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.
  
-  * FIX: When editing a Unit’s description in a List menu the previous value no longer shows through the editfield. +**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.
-  * FIX: Extended Color Lamps now work properly again in the new Hue plugin. This was a regression in the beta build of this version and is now fixed. Extended Color Lamps (ones that support both color temperature and color) now work normally again. If you had trouble with the beta version please try the conversion again. +
-  * FIX: In the Home Kit plugin the Garage Door device type is no longer reported backwards by Home Kit. +
-  * FIX: Several minor issues with the new unicode handling from the beta version were fixed. +
-  * Change: In the Lutron RadioRA plugin I was not able to reproduce a reported problem, probably again with text encoding changes, but I have added much more detailed error reporting to the section of code that was affected so that if anyone has this error again it will contain enough info for me to fix it even without being able to duplicate it. +
-  * FIX: Automatically created plugin units no longer lack a unit properties reference. Previously if you tried to “Show Unit Properties” on a new automatically created unit you would get an error rather than the expected Edit Unit Properties dialog. This was always fine after a property was added or after a restart of the app. +
-  * FIX: Fixed a conversion problem from the old MaxSonar plugin to the new one. Units with older addressing styles “A1” instead of just “1” will be properly converted. Previously it would not find the “A1” addressed unit and would create a new one instead of converting the old one. This was always fine for new installations it was only the conversion that could be confusing. +
-  * Change: The new Hue plugin now maps values to dimmable units slightly differently. Hue bulbs do not treat a value of 0 as off but rather as their lowest dim level. In XTension you previously had to use the turn off verb to make a Hue lamp actually turn off. In this version dimming a Unit to 0 (or attempting to dim it below 0 if you’re doing a slow fade with repeated “dim by” commands) will send an actual off. Values from 1 to 100 are mapped to the native hue brightness levels of 0 to 254 rather than 1 to 254 as before so dimming to 1 should be actually dimmer than it was before. +
-  * NEW: A new option for the Hue plugin in the Edit Unit dialog to “Use Native Value” after checking this you can go to the Advanced tab of the unit and turn on the “use min/max” set the min to 0 and the max to 255 and you can now set the values for that unit specifically without the mapping. This will give you more granularity of control over the brightness of the lamp. This can be very useful for lights that you use as night lights as controlling the level at the low end is easier. This may also be more useful for their strip light controllers which have a lot of potentially useful levels at the very low end. +
-  * NEW: A new option in the Hue plugin for “slow polling” since the Hue hub does not do a true RESTful interface it must be continually polled. If you want to connect more than one XTension instance to a a Hue hub you may find that some connections are refused just because of how rapidly they must occur to get reasonable response to pressing a remote button. By selecting “slow polling” you reduce the rate of polling so that these errors do not occur. You can also do this if you don’t have any remotes or don’t care if it takes a bit longer for a bulbs status to update in XTension after changing it with some other Hue app. This can also be useful if you are connecting to a remote device across the internet or other slower network connection. +
-  * FIX: the [[dictionary:unitcontrol:simpreset|Sim Preset]] verb now properly saves color and color temperature data that you include with it. This previously worked only with the original Hue plugin but should now work for both the new Hue plugin and any other color capable plugin such as the Lifx bulbs and RGB Pseudos.+
  
 +====9.5.4 Change Log:====
  
 +  * The [[supported_hardware:hue|Phillips Hue]] plugin now properly supports non-dimmable plug in modules.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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. 
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * Fixed the incorrect link to the mailing list signup page in the purchase dialog.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +  * 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.
 +
 +-----
 +
 +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===== =====Previous Releases=====
 {{indexmenu>:current#2|js#doku}} {{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]]+
current.1559991557.txt.gz · Last modified: 2023/02/13 14:51 (external edit)