OpenSesame 2.8.0 "Gutsy Gibson" released!

sebastiaan

The next major release of OpenSesame, 2.8.0 Gutsy Gibson, is available!

• http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/getting-opensesame/download/

OpenSesame 2.8.0 comes with considerable new functionality, but is entirely backwards compatible with the 0.27 series!

From 0.27.4 to 2.8.0: New versioning scheme

The reason for jumping from version 0.27.4 straight to 2.8.0 is to adopt a more consistent versioning scheme, called semantic versioning. In semantic versioning, increasing the MAJOR version (X.-.-) indicates changes that break backwards compatibility, increasing the MINOR version (-.X.-) indicates new functionality, and increasing the PATCH version (-.-.X) indicates bug fixes.

Multiprocess runner

An important new functionality is the multiprocess runner, which allows you to execute your experiment in a different process. This should be much more robust to crashes than the old in-process way. You can select the multiprocess runner, or one of the other available runners, under preferences:

Improved support for non-Latin alphabets

A lot of effort has again gone into improving support for non-Latin alphabets. A number of new default fonts have been added, and you can now use Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Farsi, and Korean straight out of the box.

You can even enable support for bi-directional languages, i.e. languages that are (partly) written from right to left, such as Hebrew:

Don't hesitate to leave feedback if you use non-Latin alphabets. For obvious reasons, it is difficult for us to ascertain whether text is rendered correctly in all languages.

Improved text-editor component

OpenSesame's text-editor component has been split off into a separate project, called QProgEdit. QProgEdit is considerably more advanced than the old text-editor component, and, among other things, supports themes. This means that I can finally use my favorite dark theme (based on Solarized) in OpenSesame!

Full changelog

From http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/notes/2.8.0

New functionality and improvements

• Add runner functionality
• Improved exception handling
• Migrate to QProgEdit editor component
• Updated offline help pages
• Improve support for non-Latin alphabets (#211)
• Add correct-response option to touch_response plug-in (#214)
• Add style argument to canvas.fixdot()
• Add item.set_response() convenience method
• Add gamma and suppress-warnings options to psycho back-end

Bugs fixed

• Line wrapping causes double spaces (#203)
• Keywords to decode() break compatibility with Python < 2.7 (#201)
• Respect focus=no in form_base (#208)
• Fix ugly exception on Escape press in joystick plug-in (#162)
• Correctly parse non-Unix line separators in HTML parser
• Do not give ugly warning on close (#124)
• Set subject_parity in Android runtime (#221)

Debian packaging

• Remove large template files

Windows packaging

• Update included libraries. See modules() output below.

OpenSesame 2.8.0
Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 10 2013, 19:24:18) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]
OpenCV is not available
OpenCV2 2.4.7
QProgedit 1.0.0
Expyriment 0.7.0b~opensesame2 (Revision 0b10a83590c31285a5d94b3b8479f302f1abc8f3; Python 2.7.6)
NumPy 1.8.0
PIL is available (version is unknown)
PsychoPy 1.78.01
PyAudio 0.2.7
PyGame 1.9.1release
Pyglet 1.1.4
PyOpenGL 3.0.2
PyQt 4.10.3
PySerial 2.7
python-bidi 0.3.4
python-markdown 2.3.1
SciPy 0.13.2

martinc

Hi Sebastian, congratulations on the new release!
I'm just putting a package together for Arch Linux; 2 quick questions. (1) clicking on the "help" icon gives me "about:blank". Is there a path I've missed (or an additional resource to download)? I have python-markdown installed. (2) Arch wants to install pillow (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.3.0) instead of PIL. Is this likely to cause problems?

sebastiaan

Hi Martin,

I'm just putting a package together for Arch Linux

Thanks for doing this! :-bd

clicking on the "help" icon gives me "about:blank". Is there a path I've missed (or an additional resource to download)? I have python-markdown installed.

Ow, it's a problem with locating the system-wide help files under Linux. This also affects the Ubuntu packages, so thanks for spotting this one. I'll fix it and then notify you via this discussion.

Arch wants to install pillow (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.3.0) instead of PIL. Is this likely to cause problems?

I think this should be fine. From what I understand, Pillow is a backwards compatible fork of PIL. I have no experience with it, though!

Cheers!
Sebastiaan

sebastiaan

@martinc It was just a minor bug in the setup script. I pushed the fixed version to a temporary branch (to be merged into 2.8.1 development later):

• https://github.com/smathot/OpenSesame/tree/2.8.0-linux-2

martinc

Thanks very much! However, on this branch the OS-specific icons seem to have disappeared...

Sorry for all the hassle

--M

sebastiaan

I think this is because the icon folders in the gnome theme are symlinks to those in the default theme. You can see what I mean here:

• https://github.com/smathot/OpenSesame/tree/master/resources/theme/gnome/os-custom-icons

Did something go wrong here?

martinc

Hmm. Something wrong (those symlinks aren't appearing under -linux but they're appearing as full copies of the folders under vanilla), but I can easily fix it and it may be Arch-specific. Thanks, and I'll test and release the Arch version shortly!