Blurrr SDK Spring '18 Release

Good news! A new release of Blurrr SDK is out. This release addresses all the recent Android Studio and NDK changes. This release also introduces a whole bunch of new user friendly features. Grab it on the login/download page.


New Android Studio Generator & Auto-Configuration

nexus2cee new-splash

First, and most importantly, the Blurrr SDK Android Studio project generator has been completely rewritten. Originally when Blurrr first got started, Google had just started the transition to Android Studio. Blurrr was among the earliest to adopt Android Studio, but this predated official support for the NDK and CMake. So Blurrr SDK had to reinvent all these things on the side.

Now that Android Studio officially supports the NDK and CMake, it was time to rewrite Blurrr’s generator to use the native built-in support. So this rewrite is now complete and things work better than ever. 

One of the benefits of this, is that you can finally use the visual native debugger directly in Android Studio for your apps.

AS Debug Button

Android Studio toolbar: The debug button is the rightmost button


And as an additional bonus, BlurrrGenProj (and its command-line tool counterparts) can now automatically locate the locations of Android Studio, SDK, & NDK. So for most people, Android configuration is now completely automatic and you don’t have to deal with it. 

BlurrrGenProj Android Preferences

The Find buttons for Android Studio, Android SDK, & Android SDK can auto-locate where everything is installed on your system by parsing Android Studio’s preference files.


And as another benefit, Blurrr can now automatically open your project in Android Studio, something that Google themselves seems to struggle with (Im referring to the menu option to "Create Command Line Tool Launcher" and how it must burn in hardcoded paths to both your project & where Android Studio is located so it isnt very flexible. And I also refer to how the option is removed on Windows.) 

AS Create Command Line Launcher

Android Studio option that generates a hardcoded per-project command line tool launcher.
(Mac version pictured)

And yes, unlike the official Android Studio feature, the Blurrr feature works on all platforms including Windows.


Make sure to update to the latest Android Studio and SDK with this release. Also, remember to install the NDK, CMake, and LLDB (optional for native debugger) through the Android Studio settings.

AndroidSDKPackages


IUP & the BlurrrGenProj GUI

The slow but steady march to implementing new native backends for IUP continues. But now Blurrr itself is beginning to reap the rewards of the work. In the prior release, we slipped in a switch of the Mac BlurrrGenProj tool. The old Qt-based version was removed, and a new IUP-based version took its place. And what was fantastic was many of you noticed the difference without actually knowing the reason, citing how it felt much faster and less “off” than the prior version (i.e. the benefits of native GUI). 

Now that there is no longer the worry of maintaining two separate code bases, for this release, new UI features were finally added to BlurrrGenProj.


Project Generation Log Window

Now when you generate a project, you can watch the status output in another window. Simply press the new Console button to toggle the window.


ConsoleButton
Console Generation Log Window

New Menu Options

There are new menu items to make things more convenient.

New Menu Options

- The “Copy Path” options will copy paths to the clipboard.

- The “Open in Terminal” options will launch a new window of your platform’s default terminal in the designated directory.

- The “Open in Finder” (Mac), or “Open in Explorer” (Windows), or “Open in File Browser” (Linux), will open the platform’s GUI file browser in the designated directory.

Cancel Generation Menu Item

- There is a new menu option to cancel a current active generation in case you accidentally made a mistake.




Android Open Project Button

As mentioned, the Open Project button now works for Android Studio.

Android Open Project Button

The command line tools can also open projects.


New Linux (including Raspberry Pi) IDEs

Blurrr SDK has added new optional generators for Linux.

BlurrrGenProj Generators for Linux & Raspberry Pi

- Ninja is a much faster build tool than make.

- Code::Blocks and CodeLite are open source IDEs, complete with visual debuggers.

Code::Blocks logo
CodeLite logo


- Also, for those who missed it, there is also documentation on how to use Qt Creator with Blurrr SDK.



Mac & iOS code signing options

BlurrrGenProj now has direct support to let you pick the Identity and Team for code signing. It works by scanning your registered Provisioning files so you can select your Team.

BlurrrGenProj Code Sign Options iOS
BlurrrGenProj iOS Code Sign


BlurrrGenProj macOS Code Sign



Visual Studio 2017

Support for Visual Studio 2017 has been added. This also begins a march to eventually remove Visual Studio 2015. If you are still using 2015, don’t panic, Visual Studio 2015 still works. But you may want to start looking at upgrading. For most users, it should be as simple as installing VS2017 (C/C++ components) and generating a VS2017 project with Blurrr. If you discover any problems, please send us feedback.

Visual Studio 2017 Option




Raspberry Pi Raspbian Stretch

Raspberry Pi Raspbian had a major release from Jessie to Stretch which was a pretty major overhaul. Among other things, it introduced a new (beta) OpenGL desktop driver so windowed OpenGL apps could be used. This required some changes to SDL among other things. But updates are finally here.

Raspberry Pi also gets all the same new Linux IDEs as the Linux SDK.

RPi CodeLite FlappyBlurrr

On Raspberry Pi Raspbian Stretch
BlurrrGenProj (top left)
CodeLite (top right)
CodeLite is executing FlappyBlurrr

 



LuaFileSystem added & Lua now powering the internal tools


logo.gif

The few of you who developed for Android on Windows with Blurrr may remember the Perl dependency. Well, that is finally gone. Perl was originally a stop gap measure to get cross-platform scripting and fill in some needed Unix-ism’s that were needed to make the NDK work on Windows before Google finished bringing NDK support to Android Studio. 

When Blurrr was started, Lua had been strongly considered for writing internal tools, but that energy really needed to be put into making embedding Lua for your apps a first rate experience. Today, with Blurrr’s Lua infrastructure much more filled out, and time for the Android Studio generator rewrite, it was time to move to Lua.

Lua is the ideal solution because like Perl and other scripting languages, it is really convenient to pound out helper utilities quickly. But Lua’s unique strength is that we can ship all of it with all its (tiny) dependencies in a completely self-contained way that allows you to drag-and-drop Blurrr SDK anywhere on your hard drive. Nothing needs to be ‘installed’ (globally), and the SDK can be relocated without breaking things. And it won’t accidentally conflict with any other versions of things you may install on your computer. (In fact the reason Android Studio removed the command line launcher feature from Windows is most likely due to the fact that they wrote their utility in Python.)

AndroidStudioWindowsMissingCommandLine

No “Create Command-line Launcher” on Android Studio for Windows
Blurrr doesn’t have that problem using Lua.

Internally, Blurrr uses LPeg for parsing things like XML and BlurrrCore for the cross-platform wrapper to all the platform specific APIs that are needed. Since the project generation does a lot of stuff with files, LuaFileSystem  has now been added to Blurrr as an optional component, which you may use in your projects.

Bottom line: Blurrr SDK now fully lives up to its promise of being completely self-contained with no additional dependencies except your target platform’s native development tools.

And LuaFileSystem is now available.


Download it now!

This release has a little something for everybody. 

Go to the download page to try it out today!



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