Give the latest 5.3 beta a try

[Dean Roddey]

So 5.3 is basically ready to go. Just doing doc updates and videos and such. The current beta is completely solid and what 5.3 is going to be. If you are covered you can update at any time of course. Some notable updates are:

• The new Z-Wave driver. There's a thread in this section about it. Some useful links below if you want learn more about it.
  
• A number of improvements in the interface designer. There's now a widget palette which got lost in the initial translation to 5.x because there was just too much to do. It's back and considerably better. You have really good control over placement of popups now, and can easily place them relative to an invoking widget even if its in an overlay. You have access to the points that represent the corners and center of the invoking widget now, so you can use those for placement as well instead of hard coding positions which can be broken during design changes.
  
• WebRIVA now supports custom scaling to fit the target device. It also now supports the IntfViewer::RIVACmd action command that lets you create your own command extensions, and for us to implement built in ones. We'd done one so far which lets you invoke a URL on another tab, and we're open to others if you can come up with some that could be generically implemented.
  
• The tabs in the Admin Interface now indicate when changes have been made, so you know which open tabs have changes.
  
• And just a lot of smaller fixes and improvements that really do make the product a lot friendlier. And some internal architectural changes that will make certain types of things a lot┬ámore straightforward to do moving forward (and which has been back-applied to some existing stuff to make them easier to support.)
  
• Interface static check box widgets now have an 'auto-toggle' option. When you using them purely for user input, and will just grab the final state at the end, you don't have to provide your own toggling commands, it will toggle itself if you ask it to. This saves a lot of grunt work.
  
• There's a new cover art browser query to get X number of randomly selected titles from music or movies, which you can use to implement a suggestions type feature.
  

Here's the thread on the new Z-Wave driver. There are some videos linked to in that thread which I'm making for the new driver. And the written docs for it are in the latest betas, but of course not on the web site yet since it's not released.

http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/sho...?tid=10550

It would be nice to get some new users of it before we go live. It can now auto-identify units very nicely and auto-configure them, and it's just a lot smarter in general. We have the tools to let you gather the info we need to add support for new units, so we can get yours supported. There is a nice little set currently of maybe 50'ish models, but obviously lots of others left. There are some generic types for common things like lights and sensors that you can use for many things until we get specific support for your unit types in place.

[Dean Roddey]

Version 5.2.923 is posted. This is the first formal release candidate. Unless someone finds something bad (highly unlikely at this point) or annoying but safe to fix, this is going to be it. So it would be nice to get some folks upgraded to this for daily usage. There haven't been big changes made for some time now and number of folks have been using it, so it's quite safe to upgrade if you are covered under maintenance.

I've got the docs updated and just need to do a couple more videos preferably before the official release gets posted.