SDK 8: Disable radial/angled text drawing if a product does not have a GPU

In the changelog of SDK 8.0.0-Beta:

Disable radial/angled text drawing if a product does not have a GPU.

They promote it as a bugfix, but to me it sounds like a non backward compatible change. If I understand correctly what this means then someone who 2 days ago could release their app and it uses angled or radial texts, now won't be able to compile (in the good scenario), and in worst case the app already released will stop working or will crash once the users upgrade to the latest firmware.

Does anyone know what this means?

0 flocsy🤠 3 months ago in reply to FlowState

you mean to check on a real device? Then you'll need to try 2 builds, one with compile time has check optimization and one without.

0 FlowState 3 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

No, I meant check those 4 newly supported (*) devices in the sim, although I have no reason to believe that the has checks for drawRadialText/drawAngularText will return anything but false, either at compile time or run time, based on the corresponding *.api.debug.xml files.

(* according to the 8.0 API doc)

Indeed I ran the following test code in the sim...

System.println("has drawRadialText = " + (Graphics.Dc has :drawRadialText));

...for all combos of:

- SDKs: 7.4.3, 8.0.0
- devices: d2airx10, fr965
- --disable-api-has-check-removal present / not present

Output:

- For all test cases with fr965: has drawRadialText = true
- For all test cases with d2airx10: has drawRadialText = false

So I'm not sure what exactly the doc changes are all about. Maybe that part of changelog is actually for the *next* beta (8.0.1?) and it's saying that the 4 "newly supported" devices are actually going to be removed from the next doc? Idk, and at this point idc.

0 flocsy🤠 3 months ago in reply to FlowState

FlowState said:
Maybe that part of changelog is actually for the *next* beta (8.0.1?) and it's saying that the 4 "newly supported" devices are actually going to be removed from the next doc? Idk, and at this point idc.

LOL, that would be almost like the announced but never implemented settings features :)

"Ah, and BTW in System10 we'll remove features that we accidentally announced in the documentation in System8, though we meant to do it only in System9, but we're removing it anyway now... I mean not now, in System10. Or 11. We'll see..."

0 FlowState 1 month ago

In hindsight this thread is pretty funny considering:

- drawAngledText/drawRadialText were removed from the real fr165 (and ofc also from the fr165 device files)

- users experienced crashes because of apps that used these functions for fr165 without has checks

- many threads were posted and bug reports filed

- finally drawAngledText/drawRadialText were reinstated on the real fr165 (but not in the device files...yet)

Ofc we still don't know why those functions were removed in the first place, unless the idea was to "artificially" restrict the functionality of fr165. after the fact. [I don't necessarily have a problem with "artificial restrictions" per se, but I draw the line at giving users functionality then taking it away later.]

It's one of those disasters you could've almost predicted ahead of time, especially if you work at the company (as opposed to being on the outside and looking in). [I have had this exact experience at work more than once]