Wespal version 0.5.0 is out now! And it’s a very packed release this time around, more than even 0.4.0.
The main highlights for this release include built-in support for Krita and OpenRaster image formats (.kra, .ora) on all platforms, once again courtesy of KDE Frameworks 6; a redesigned main preview UI, a new Settings dialog, a Base64 image URI generator, and several quality-of-life changes and fixes.
There are so, so many changes this time around that if you want a full list of them, it’d be best if you looked at the changelog found in the v0.5.0 release page on GitHub. To give you an idea, this was originally meant to be Wespal version 0.4.1, but I ended up cramming so many significant features into it that I decided to bump it to 0.5.0 instead.
Let’s go over a few of the more notable additions for this release, before I go into more detail about a couple of them and bore you with an extensive technical rant involving KDE.
While working on Wespal 0.4.0 I ran into many regressions, some of them caused by code refactoring, others by behavioural changes I didn’t entirely foresee, including a particularly annoying one involving the XCF plugin and embedded colour profiles that took me about three nights to have an eureka moment about.
My future self is gonna be thankful some day that I finally added a CI workflow and test suite to Wespal, built and run on Linux, macOS, and Windows for each push via GitHub Actions, so I can promptly find out if I accidentally break some of the more crucial components, or cause the whole thing to stop compilling on particular platform because of a missed #ifdef or unusual typedef difference. Or, you know, because while I require Qt 6.4 as a minimum, my development environment actually uses Qt 6.4, so one day I may slip up and add code that does not compile against the 6.4 API.
Now if only I could have CI coverage for the static Windows builds as well...
After a very long hiatus, I finally got around to dusting off an old tool I wrote yeaaaars ago for previewing recoloured Wesnoth assets. Over the past month, I ported it from Qt 4 to Qt 6 (and C++17), cleaned it up, and hopefully properly ensured that this time around everything works 100% fine on macOS — except for the lack of app signing, at least.
Wespal (formerly Wesnoth RCX) version 0.4.0 is out now!
