10. Release notes #

← Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0 · Contents

A version you own never loses its components: 2.0 contains the sixteen from 1.0, and a key whose maintenance covers the date of your build compiles with the latest DLL — see License.

2.0 — September 2026 #

Menu bar — application menu bar: menus, submenus, checkable entries, separators, icons, shortcuts and &File mnemonics, drawn by the library in the application's theme.
Command palette — one shortcut, three letters, and any action of the application is reached without hunting through menus. Searches the label, the group and the keywords, several words at once.
Radial menu — commands in a ring around the cursor on right-click, chosen by direction rather than by walking a list.
Shell explorer — the real Windows shell tree: Desktop, This PC, drives, folders, Network, with the machine's own icons. A single of_expand opens a deep path.
Stepbar — a wizard's trail of steps: the ones done, the current one and the ones to come, horizontal or vertical.

A reshaped API on the sixteen from 1.0 #

One key, one address; everything from the component; an addition returns a code. The three rules, the before/after and every changed signature are in Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0. What motivated it: a handle that added could not say it had refused, and three arguments to name an item forced every component to invent its own way of doing so.

On every component #

of_count, of_keys_at and of_has, on the component and at every level: what a component holds can be asked, there is no need to keep track of it yourself.
Every method returning a long says what its return means: 0 applied, -5 invalid argument, -2 component not created — in the demo's embedded doc as well as here.
Item properties read back live: the icon of a listbar entry, the text and icon of a tile, the state of a bar button — a getter says what is on screen, never a remembered value.
ib_visible on every menu entry — menu bar, context menu, radial menu, ribbon menus: hiding is not greying, the entry leaves the menu, shortcut included, and keeps its key to come back.
The status bar builds its menus one entry at a time (of_add_menu_item ("panel/id", …)), with an entry handle that greys, checks and hides — instead of the two parallel arrays of of_set_panel_menu.
ue_script_error: a script error in the page reaches PowerBuilder with its message and stack, instead of being lost.

Fixed #

A disabled or hidden item no longer answers anything: neither click nor keyboard — the listbar still selected a greyed entry on Enter.
Greyed text is legible in every theme (3:1 contrast at least), and hovered text too in dark mode — two disabled ribbon buttons went invisible in Office 2007.
A Windows path read back from the page came with its backslashes doubled (C:\\Windows); a value holding a quote was cut short.
Dock container: the panel pinned on the left lost its right border above 100% display scaling.
Ribbon: the icon of a disabled button was not greyed in compact mode; a menu bar title lit up together with the hovered one.
Code editor: the text read back after folding was the old one, and unfolding overwrote what had been typed.

1.0 — August 2026 #

First release: sixteen components — button, code editor, dock container, listbar, message box, PDF viewer, picture, progress, ribbon, statictext, statusbar, tab, tiles box, toaster, toolbar, web browser — one DLL to deploy, x86 and x64 under the same name, no .NET, ActiveX or PBNI dependency. Office, Fluent and Metro themes, light and dark; six languages and RTL; entirely offline licensing; PowerBuilder 10.2 to 2025.