BeeWare has had an exciting start to the new year, with a couple of significant releases

What we've done

We had two big releases in January.

Firstly, we released Briefcase 0.3.12. This is the first Briefcase release in 3 months, so it includes a lot of improvements, but the most notable improvements are the new "Testing mode", a major improvement to the Android build process, and a huge number of bug fixes and improvements - especially on Windows.

Secondly - and more importantly - we released Toga 0.3.0! No more dev releases or --pre flags for pip - the stable release of Toga on PyPI is now closely tracking actual development. It's been over 5 years since we last released an official stable Toga version, even though we've been recommending the dev releases for most of that time. However, as a result of a number of changes that landed this month, we're finally committing to the 0.3.0 branch properly.

These releases incorporate changes going back months (and years); but we made some very specific progress during January:

What's next?

Much of the last 3 months have been spent getting a GUI testing framework in place for Toga. That work is now in place, so now we'll be working full time on writing GUI tests for Toga, with the aim of getting Toga to 100% coverage. Along the way, we'll discover all the edge cases, bugs, and partially missing implementations that are lurking in the individual Toga widgets.

Want to get involved?

Want to get involved? Here are some open issues that would be a great place to get started with contributing to a BeeWare project. They're all relatively minor changes, but would provide a big improvement to the lives of BeeWare users:

  1. Modify the handling of app signing options
  2. Filter out a message generated after Xcode updates
  3. Add the ability to refresh the support package in a project
  4. Provide protection against creating projects with "semi-reserved" names
  5. Add the ability to configure the ABIs built by an Android project
  6. Add support for the ANDROID_HOME environment variable
  7. Purge cache folders when installing app code in Briefcase
  8. Add a template branch option when creating a new project
  9. Improve validation of project names in the Briefcase wizard

Pick one of these tickets, drop a comment on the ticket to let others know you're looking at it, and try your hand at a PR! We have a guide on setting up a Briefcase development environment; but if you need any additional assistance or guidance, you can ask on the ticket, or join us on the BeeWare Discord server.

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