Free42 version 1.5.7

[Thomas Okken]

Hi all,

I have gotten complaints about the action bar, and I will make it optional in the next release. I hope that clears things up.

In case anyone is wondering why I added the action bar in Free42 for Android in the first place: most (all?) recent Android devices lack a menu button. For backward compatibility, most (all?) of them do provide another way of activating the menu, by long-pressing one of the buttons that do still exist. The problem is that this new way of accessing the menu is completely non-obvious.

I'd been getting questions, with steadily increasing frequency over time, from people asking how to access the menu. More troubling were questions about how to import or export programs, or select alternative skins. Of course it's hard to figure out how to do these things if the OS is hiding a crucial part of the user interface from you!

So I added the action bar. Because that's the officially blessed way of designing a discoverable user interface for Android apps now.

I was surprised by the number of complaints that this change caused. A bit miffed at some of them, too, I must confess. Free42 is unusable garbage all of a sudden? People are deducting stars from the app's rating because of a few pixels? My God, what would happen if I ever introduced an actual bug that made the app actually less usable? I must confess I'm scratching my head over some of this furor.

But c'est la vie. I'm not going to abandon Free42 because of a few ungracious people. There are tens of thousands of people who use the app without being insensitive or rude to me. Also, maintaining this app is something I love to do and take pride in, even if I don't have nearly enough time to work on it (has it really been more than a year since the last release? Daaang.)

One thing I should mention: I'm not a regular visitor to the HP Museum Forum any more. Maybe that will change, but this is the first time I've visited in a long time. I do, however, have a Google Group, dedicated to Free42 and nothing but Free42. While I wouldn't suggest that people *shouldn't* post on the HP Museum Forum about Free42-related matters, if you want to be sure that I read what you post, you should (also) post on the Free42 group, where I get email notifications of every single post.

There's a clickable link to that group in the About Free42 window -- which is really easy to find thanks to the action bar. ;-)

- Thomas