Greetings! This month we don’t have many new features to talk about – we’ve mostly been focusing on bug-fixing, security, and some usability improvement. More on those in a minute. There are a couple of newsworthy things, though:
- We’ve been looking at ways to improve Cordova* plugins that could help HTML5 games developers get their apps discovered and monetized. So, we built and released a Cordova plugin to github to help you create leaderboards using Google Play* Games Services. This is now in the “Featured Plugins” in the Intel XDK.
- Another thing is that since we launched the Intel® XDK IoT Edition, the feedback has been fantastic. Check out this article Dr. Dobbs wrote about it and the Intel® Iot Devkit– a great description. We’ve been to several IoT Devkit hackathons in the past month and it really is amazing what makers are creating with Javascript/Node.js. Just amazing.
- Security - we take security very seriously:
- We’ve been enhancing the authentication with the Intel XDK and cloud build servers to improve security. The side effect of this is that only Intel XDKs version 1332 (September 10 release) and newer will be authenticated with the latest build servers as of our next release in December. So users that have not upgraded to the later XDKs should do so now to make sure you can continue to access the build servers. We apologize if this causes any inconvenience, but is for a good reason.
- We updated our Cordova containers for Android to the 3.5.1 at the beginning of October to address a potential security issue that Apache Cordova and Google Play warned about. I hope you have been able to rebuild and resubmit your app by now. Here is the forum thread for more info if you had not seen it.
Now here are other things you will see fixed or updated in this release:
- Support for Apple* iOS* 8 and iPhone* 6 builds.
- Complete build logs are now available to help you on the final build screen for review for apps built using Cordova 3.x. This will help you determine the cause of build failures, and help our support team better assist developers with such if they need help.
- App Starter, the UI Builder/prototyping tool is now deprecated. App Designer has more utility and responsiveness and it doesn’t make sense to have two UI builders, so App Designer is the one going forward. You won’t see App Starter as an option to start a new app, but will still come up when you open a project created with App Starter. It will be removed completely in Q1 2015 likely.
- App Preview Legacy is now in the app stores to support apps still using the legacy (non-Cordova) containers.
- Many bug fixes including crashes that users had reported.
Here is a link to the Release Notes to see all other changes.
As always, please keep the feedback coming!
Joe Wolf