I would like to give some news on the project status. Current and future.

It’s been a long time since the last stable version but it’s finally time to release an update. I just published V12.9 in the stable channel, and it introduces multi-selection which is a much anticipated feature. I sincerely hope it will live up to your expectations. Special thanks to Beta Tester for your feedback!

That’s for the good news, now some less good ones (but not that bad, please continue reading).

Five months between releases is a lot. As you may have read or hear from other independent developers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to allocate time and efforts on apps with the Google Play revenue model. I am no exception to this and if someone was still wondering, yes, I had to slow down work on Lightning.

However, there are plenty of things to improve in the app and new features to add, ranging from simple usability improvements like recently used values in the color picker, to most advanced and geeky scripting features.

For this reason I would like to experiment with crowdfunding to give a “boost” to the project. I have heard of AppStretch for this, its goal is to help developers to fund development of new features for existing apps (not create new ones). I have already a set of features in mind if anybody is interested. Let’s see how it goes.

That’s not all. I am once again in a major rework of the project codebase, probably the biggest one since its inception. Over the time the app has grown with new capabilities but the internal architecture didn’t follow. It is now difficult to maintain the app, some new features are hard or impossible to implement, and worst, a few known bugs have no fix.

I intend to change this situation with an extended internal architecture change (almost 50% done!). On one hand it eats up a lot of my time and will cause many bugs and issues. On the other hand its a requirement for the project to keep moving.

And once again I will need a big help from you to test this new version, let’s call it V14. I will publish it as an alpha first, I expect in a few weeks, not before.

Enough speak! Your feedback is appreciated!

Edit: V12.9b3: with more fixes.

This second beta is on its way with a set of random bug fixes and minor improvements. I believe it should fix most crashes found in b1 and run reasonably stable.

Full ChangeLog: http://www.lightninglauncher.com/wordpress/change-log/

It’s been more than 5 months since the last release, but here it is, the shiny new beta version of Lightning Launcher is available, tada!

Yes, I have been quite silent for a while, but even if things are slowly moving, they are nevertheless moving forward.

So what’s new in this release?

95% of it is multi-selection. That’s a lot of work for something that is not even a feature, but if it can save a bit of time and make the life easier for many, then it had to be done. I’m glad it’s done.

Other changes are:

– support for using JavaAdapter in script thanks to Lukas Morawietz. This may sound like an obscure and rarely used feature but it has the power to enable outstanding use cases. Join me to thank Lukas again, he brought together a simple but brilliant idea and tenacity to make it work.

– icon normalization (icon size mode property)

– fixed the folder’s title not updating when changed through a binding or script (that’s for Jappie Toutenhoofd 😉 )

Enjoy!

Full ChangeLog: http://www.lightninglauncher.com/wordpress/change-log/

Just a minor update (the first of the year!) to to fix a few bugs.

Full ChangeLog: http://www.lightninglauncher.com/wordpress/change-log/

No more a beta, it’s time for a release!

There are more features to add (as always!), but this version is stable and in a good shape. I am happy to switch it into the “production” channel 🙂

Thank you all for your support!

Full ChangeLog:

http://www.lightninglauncher.com/wordpress/change-log/ ‎