Palm Developer Center

What's New in 1.0

Lots and lots of new features!

Please clear your browser cache before logging in, and see the important release note at the bottom of the page regarding existing apps from previous versions of Ares.

Components:

  • Ares now has Components, which are widgets that provide functionality, but without any user interface. The palette now contains the service calls, sensors, etc that are in the webOS SDK.
  • Components can be drag-and-dropped onto the canvas, where they will show up as icons across the bottom of the screen. They can be selected and configured in the property inspector, and then called in a single line of code.
  • Inline help - When a component is selected on the canvas or view tree, the last tab of the property inspector will show jsdoc-style inline help for that component, so you can see what you can call on each component.
  • For example, you can drag out a camera component, and in the ontap handler of a button, type this.$.camera1.execute(); to launch the camera in your app!
  • See the 1.0 tutorial to see how easy it is to create an app that connects to phone services using components.

Designer Ergonomics

  • Undo and Redo in the interface builder!
  • Cut, Copy, Paste in the interface builder!
  • New shortcut buttons to swap between the designer and code assistant for a given scene
  • Improved support for drag and drop between panels and at the top and bottom of the canvas

Find and Replace

  • Find and replace within a file
  • Find and replace within multiple projects, complete with filters for which projects

JSLint Integration

  • JSLint feedback is now integrated into the code editor
  • New JSLint "Monitor" feature will provide feedback on your code as you type continuously

And lots more...

  • New FeedList widget for RSS feeds
  • Google Maps v3 wrapper widget for including multi-touch enabled maps in your applications
  • Left and right panels can be hidden/shown with a single click on their arrows
  • Unified spot in the UI for Find and Replace, JSLint, Debugger, and Log Viewer
  • Improved Debugger functionality, including viewing all variables in scope in a tree control, updated as you step through your code
  • Code beautification in the code editor
  • Lots of bug fixes

Please Note

  • We have updated the event signatures in Ares to be more consistent and easier to maintain, but if you access and re-run or package an existing beta project in the new 1.0, you may experience your app breaking, and you need to make a simple change.

    You will need to change your event handlers so that the "inSender" event comes before all other arguments.

    So for example, in this code:
    button1Tap: function(event, inSender)

    Should be changed to this:
    button1Tap: function(inSender, event)
  • Please note that we have a find and replace feature now in the code editor. Simply searching for (event, inSender) and replacing it with (inSender, event) will catch nearly every case where a change is required. List event handlers would remain and need to be manually changed.