Beta 576
Hi all. It's been awhile, and boy do I have a juicy update for you all. This changelog is going to be structured a bit differently from the past as I've got a lot to cover.
So, lets get into the big question... Where have the updates been????
Over the past 6 months, I've been pretty busy with real life, and not to mention my actual job! I actually travelled to South Korea for 3 months during the summer, and I got married! During that time though, I've also been trying as much as I can to find time to keep updates flowing to XSO. That obviously wasn't going so well. However, I did make progress, and that slow progress has culminated into todays beta patch.
So.. What's this patch all about then?
Well.. This patch is about a few things. Addressing a few elephants in the room if you will.
[h2]UI Redesign 3.0 (part 1)[/h2]
This patch marks the third redesign for XSOverlay's UI. This redesign puts an emphasis on being as minimal as possible while showing you only the things you want to see. That may seem obvious, but the previous UI had things like your steam profile picture, and while I think that looked nice to have, it was a lot of wasted space for not a whole lot of purpose.
The new UI is simpler, easier to understand, and actually can look cooler in certain situations.
This is also a first step into exposing web application plugins as a thing that users can create for XSOverlay.
The UI (not all of it yet) is actually running through a local web application. You can even go modify the way it looks if you want to!
So.. How
does it look?
Well. Like this!
This has a few changes to it, as you can see.
The battery life is now in it's own floating bar, and actually becomes and infinitely scroll-able list if you add more devices.
You'll notice the lack of any fluff. Now, I personally like just a
little bit of fluff, I just can't help it.. and that leads us nicely into the next change.
[h2]Media Management Improvements[/h2]
The XSOverlay media management system was always a little lackluster. It tried to find specific application windows and get the title of the window in order to find the song title and artist.. which wasn't exactly.. well.. great. It "worked," but it lacked the ability to do things such as getting album art of a song.
Now, the media management system actually just hooks into the Windows 10/11 media center and pulls all of it's information from that.
This means that now I can do things like show album art, separate the song title and artist into different lines, properly detect play / pause state, etc.
Here's how the Wrist UI now looks with some media playing!
Toggling the media player will hide all the fluff, however, the media player will try to automatically show itself if it detects media playing.
So what else do I have to show?
Surprisingly.. there's more!
[h2]Settings Redesign[/h2]
With UI 3.0 (part 1) has come a redesign of the settings UI. This moves it away from Unity UI, like the wrist, and into the new web app format.
Here's how this looks now.
As this is a beta, and things are currently being transitioned between old and new UI, some of the settings will simply do nothing right now and will be removed in future betas.
This includes stuff like "Show Window Previews", as the new UI I have planned for monitor / window selection doesn't incorporate thumbnails.
The keen eyed among you may have noticed a new setting though, and that's "Input Method" with "Touch Input" set as the selection.
That's right!
[h2]Windows Touch Input[/h2]
The default input method is now Windows Touch. This emulates a tablet. Click and drag to scroll, click and hold to right click, etc.
Don't worry, for those who preferred the old input method, you can still switch back using the dropdown provided.
But this update doesn't stop there.. finally, we get to the big kahuna. The giant elephant in the room.
[h2]Graphics Capture Bug Fixes[/h2]
Windows Graphics Capture API crashes have hopefully now been solved. This has been plaguing XSO since the switch to the newer capture API, and many users have had issues with it. Well, with this beta, this should no longer be a problem, or, it should at least be significantly improved.