Fulcrum v4.5.0

Release notes

A small release: a way to support Fulcrum, a sturdier update check and documentation that says only what the app really does.

Supporting Fulcrum

Fulcrum is free and stays free, with no paid tier, no licence key and no feature held back. For anyone who wants to support its development there is now a donate button in the header, just left of the light and dark toggle, reachable from the keyboard like every other control. Pressing it hands the payment page to your browser; Fulcrum itself opens no connection for it. If your desktop declines to open a browser, the app tells you so and shows the address. The same link sits in the README and on the website.

Commercial licences

Fulcrum stays open source under GPL-3.0 with its interface under LGPL-3.0. The README and the website now say that a commercial licence for my own code can also be bought, for anyone whose project those terms do not suit.

A sturdier update check

If the window was closed while an update check was still waiting on GitHub, the answer arriving afterwards could raise an error on the background thread. It is now quietly dropped, since nobody is left to tell. This was found by reading the code rather than reported, so it is hardening rather than the fix for a crash anyone saw.

Documentation that claims only what holds

Generated levels are now described as they behave: each template is resampled in search of a great move up to a limit, so the move is sought rather than guaranteed. The macOS build instructions now describe the keychain route to notarisation as the script actually takes it. The sensitivity sweep on the website now gives its true size of 36 perturbed configurations. A new document in the repository sets out the decisions Fulcrum rests on and what each one costs.

For anyone building from source

The development guide is now DEVELOPMENT.md. The linter is pinned to the release the repository is clean under. The Windows and macOS builds now need Nuitka 4.2.1 or later and stop before compiling, naming the version they found, when an older one is installed.

The website

The tool and model pages are split into a page for each part: the moves and signals, the board and the guide, the weights, the assumptions and the testing. Old links to the long pages still land in the right place. The board screenshot is new and shows the donate button in the header. The installer and the Linux package now name ernster.dev/fulcrum as the app's site.