What's New in V2.2?

New features

• The "go back one generation" button on the toolbar now has click-and-hold repeat, like its go-forwards neighbor. This feature is mainly designed for fairly small patterns. You can use it for big ones, but it is jumpy as earlier generations are calculated.
• Pattern libraries are now loaded as a background task. This is particularly helpful for slow machines, where loading the standard libraries can take tens of seconds.
• You can remove a rectangular area from a selection, using ctrl-click-drag and a right-button popup option.
• Auto-scrolling now uses a speed control similar to Office - the further you move the cursor outside the window, the faster it goes (up to a limit which you can set in the Options page).
• If generation 0 includes a selection, this selection is re-applied when you return to generation 0. This makes it easier to make small adjustments to a game.
• If there is a selection, it can be "nudged" one cell at a time using the arrow keys.

Minor Things

• The grid/map button is now a click-and-stay-pressed button to turn the grid on.
• Various small UI tweaks and enhancements to come into line with current Windows conventions.
• Some algorithm and memory management changes have sped various things up. Census operations now run about 30% faster.

Bug Fixes

• Winlife could hang if the speed-grow button was pressed and other toolbar buttons were pressed.
• Under fairly obscure circumstances, the Save function could hang, filling the disk up until Winlife was stopped. (It needed: pattern modified and not grown; displayed using grid; pattern large enough to need RLE format. And even then not always).
• Sometimes, clicking on a game to modify it would cause the selection to disappear.
• Ctrl-double-click did not add the object to the current selection.

What's New in V2.1?

Nothing very exciting, I'm afraid. To my amazement, in the year and a half that Winlife32 has been available, nobody has suggested a single additional feature that they'd like. There are just a few bug fixes.

• It now runs correctly on early 32-bit versions of Windows, i.e. 95 and 98.
• User-defined neighborhoods work correctly.
• Some autostop bugs fixed. Previous version would sometimes run a game for a lot longer than necessary, and very occasionally would find the end too soon or would give the "generations very similar" message when the situation could in fact be analysed.
• The Help file has the right name.
• A few minor glitches in the user interface have been fixed.

Some people have reported that the Open file dialog does not appear correctly with some older Windows versions. I have not been able to reproduce this (using Windows 95). If you have more information, please let me know.