After a discussion with some members of the community we decided to shift the weight of our support efforts to StackOverflow from our existing google group discussion forum. Notice that we will still answer questions in the discussion forum but we strongly prefer using StackOverflow (don't forget to use the codenameone tag).
Community Collaboration - one of the big issues with the existing discussion forum is that the community finds it harder to collaborate and incentives for community support aren't clear.
As part of this work we also try to answer questions thru StackOverflow even when we get them in other channels (e.g. email support). This can be helpful as a future reference to users who are looking at the given issue encountered by a pro user.
Plugins are now automatically imported when projects are created.
Plugin development should now just involve implementation of the native portions in Java. The rest is automated.
All of the details are listed in the main port site. Documentation specific to plugin development can be found here.
This effectively means it should be MUCH easier to port plugins to Cordova with these changes.
We've simplified text editing features in two significant ways, first we just added a set of methods to TextArea instead of the venerable yet unintuitive methods of Display.
We now have startEditing, startEditingAsync, isEditing & stopEditing in TextArea. Most of these are pretty trivial with the exception of startEditingAsync which wraps the call to startEditing in a callSerially. That's generally a good practice if you can follow that.
We also added to Form the methods setEditOnShow/getEditOnShow which allow you to determine a TextArea that will enter editing mode immediately when the form is shown. This is a common and somewhat error prone use case since its pretty tricky to know when a form was actually shown (post transition).
Hints in text fields are really useful to convey information, however they can become really bothersome when working with details that aren't yours. E.g. around here Shai and Almog can be both surnames and given names so a form showing a text field with Shai and Almog might not convey the right information to the user.
So why have a hint at all if we should always use labels as is the case above?
You need to style FloatingHint in the designer to provide the style for the label on top (the hint uses the same TextHint). Other than that the code is trivial just wrap any text area/field with a new FloatingHint(myTextField).
Up until recently we used our logo as the default icon for Codename One applications, in the next plugin update we'll replace it with this image. Obviously you would need to replace it as you would for every shipping application but as a person whose phone is filled to the brim with Codename One logo icons for all the testcases I need to run I think this is a huge improvement.