1.0.15 — a collaboration crash worth updating for

[nyblnet]

1.0.15 is out, a day after 1.0.14, because of one bug that deserved a release of its own.

If you collaborate, please update

While a live session was running, taking a formatting option away crashed everyone else's copy of the deck. Switching a gradient fill back to solid, turning an outline off, ungrouping, unlinking a chart from its table, clearing a click target — any of them.

The worst part is how it presented. The person making the edit saw nothing at all: no error, no warning, their own deck completely fine. Everyone else's session simply stopped applying changes. From the other side it looked like the connection had dropped, or like the person had stopped working.

Removing a property is sent as an instruction with no value attached, and one line of diagnostic code assumed a value was always there. Adding things was always safe, which is exactly why it lasted: the case only arises when an edit takes something away.

The convergence tests — 45,000 checks that have caught more than fifteen ordering bugs in this engine — never saw it, because their generator only ever assigned properties. An op that removes one had never once occurred. They generate removals now, which is the part that stops the next one.

Also in this release

• The topbar comes back in the right order. Narrowing the window folds the toolbar into menus; widening it again put the buttons back by a rule rather than by memory, so Comment drifted out of the insert tools and Save ended up sitting after Help.
• "Save a copy…" and share exports remember their own folder. The save picker used one identity for every kind of save, so it opened wherever you last put a view-only copy — even when you were saving your working file.
• A deck opens where the browser refuses it storage. With site data blocked, or in some private windows, the editor could fail to start rather than simply doing without the things that need storage.

Full notes: CHANGELOG · release

If you missed 1.0.14 yesterday

Space-drag to pan the canvas (and room to scroll past the slide's edges), a button that fits a text box to its text, entrances and count-ups that finally run on morph slides, built-in layouts that fit the slide, and window.bento.validate() for checking a deck against everything the runtime otherwise ignores in silence.

On finding things like this

This one was found by reading code, not by a report — which is lucky, because it is close to unreportable from the outside. The person triggering it sees nothing wrong, and the people affected see something that looks like a network problem. If you have ever had a live session quietly stop keeping up, that may well have been this.

If something looks off, please say so even when you can't characterise it. "Collaboration went weird when I was tidying up formatting" would have been a perfectly good bug report.

Questions in Q&A, ideas in Ideas, bugs in issues.