We are gearing up for two of the biggest shows of the year: Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and Mobile World Conference (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain – both the week of March 2. Come find us in the Intel® Software booths at the shows (Hall 8.1 at MWC) and stop by and get an Intel XDK sticker! (We’ll find some ways to get them to those of you not going to the shows, too.) As an added incentive :) you'll find many of the experts that you communicate with on the forum at those shows!
As you hopefully saw in our December 2014 release, we introduced support for many HTML5 games engines: Construct2*, Cocos2D*, Phaser*, EaselJS* part of CreateJS* suite of libraries, and Pixi*, an asset manager to help with manipulating and coding images and animation, and added several new Apache Cordova* plugins for in-app purchasing, ads, leaderboards, etc. to help monetize your games.
This latest update of Intel XDK continues to improve the HTML5 gaming support in time for GDC, but also includes several other important things:
Support for Sublime* Text editor: we know that many of our users find the greatest value of the Intel XDK in its ability to preview, test, and debug on-device prior to building the app, and many prefer to use their favorite editor while doing so. We made that easier for Sublime Text users with a package to Sublime Text that drive the testing and debugging options with the Intel XDK. Here is a link to the Sublime Text package for the Intel XDK.
We changed the “getting started” options for new app projects to make it even easier to start creating different kinds of HTML5 projects. We heard from users that we had too many choices to get started, and that it wasn’t clear how to create an app without Cordova (a web app). Well, we changed it. We introduced the option to choose a blank “Standard HTML5” app without Cordova and plugins included, and a “HTML5 + Cordova” app already set up for Cordova. Of course, in the project settings, you can go back and add Cordova and plugins to the project as you need, as well as easily choose the targeted platforms.
We added Cordova* 4.x and Crosswalk 11 support to stay on top of the latest developments in the Apache* Cordova and Crosswalk Projects. Most of the changes are behind the scene in project set up and build-time. All you need to do is specify the version you want to use in the Build settings.
Finally, this is just a heads-up. In March we’re going to be rolling out some changes to improve security, and move the user forums.
First, we have a user forum for Intel XDK support on the Intel Developer Zone (IDZ) site (the parent site of xdk.intel.com) that has been up for several months: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-xdk. Please start using it! We want to completely move off of our current (this forum) Intel XDK user forums so that we can better help you, and for you to communicate with other developers. It offers a much better forum software platform that is also used by many other Intel software products and communities.
Second, we will be merging your Intel XDK accounts with the greater IDZ using a more safe/secure single sign-on infrastructure. You will finally be able to have the same account for the Intel XDK and User Forums! For those of you that do not already have an account with the Intel Developer Zone, the merge will be seamless – we’ll set it up as you login to the Intel XDK. For those of you that already have an IDZ account, you may have to reset your password so that the Intel XDK and IDZ are merged properly. Finally, you will need to make sure the Intel XDK you are using is a later version for authentication with the latest build servers – at least version 1332 (September 2014 update) or later.
For additional info, please see the release notes: https://software.intel.com/en-us/html5/articles/release-notes-information-intel-xdk