New Fritzing release 0.9.6

Hello everyone! Today you get your hands on version 0.9.6. We have tested it on macOS Catalina and Big Sur, Windows 10 64 bit, and Ubuntu 20.04!

Fritzing 0.9.6

Installers

Both Microsoft and Apple have raised the bar on how to execute some code on your computer. They check the developer’s ID and warn or simply reject any program with mysterious origins. This was no issue in the past, but as regulations became stricter, more and more users had to jump quite high to get Fritzing running. We got all the certificates required and packaged and signed Fritzing 0.9.6 for a smooth setup.

Fixes

This is a maintenance release. We have fixed at least ten crashes, several critical bugs, and about 30-100 regular bugs, depending on how you count. Approximately 300 issues have been closed since the last release 0.9.4.

Some of the fixes are:

  • Ground fill is connected only to the lower side #2186
  • The routing status algorithm needs to handle the part to part connections (LED in an Arduino for example). Fixes #2685
  • Export to PNG does not update until restart#3073
  • Fill image with the background before exporting, fixes #3261
  • crash when both, bus and subpart in the same part #3329
  • Override system color for notes. Fixes #3530
  • Gerber rendering moves and skips nodes in board outline #3537
  • Crash when editing connector highlight colors #3566
  • No ‘routing complete’ message when no wires used to connect parts #3579
  • Override system color for parts bin list #3600
  • Two parts connected via breadboard don’t route #3616
  • font-size px is the same as user coordinates and can be ignored #3619
  • design rules check not seeing all of the copper for specific part #3647
  • If the property is empty, take the default one. Fixes #3648
  • White note text #3657
  • Dashed line is gone in breadboard view after moving element #3683
  • Gerber export missing and moving some custom PCB cutouts #3686
  • A typo in german translation #3694
  • Finish pending move operation before deleting an item. Fixes issue #3697
  • Ignore breadboard and schema wires when setting PCB layer count #3699
  • Deselect all items before exporting an image to PNG or JPG. Fixes #3712
  • Export PNG without selection rectangles #3712
  • 2.2mF capacitor #3713
  • Fritzing 0.9.4 crashes on macOS Catalina 10.15.7 #3747
  • Export as image, toggled layers not honored #3771
  • Fix the number of allowed digits within the resistor regex
  • Fix bug that prevented trace width for autorouter to be remembered
  • Fix SVG path element parse and matching of extra graphics to PCB connector pad
  • Fix broken duplicated network calls
  • Fix nullptr dereference
  • Workaround: show a white icon instead of nullptr crash
  • Fix crash when SVG file was not found

Features

It is now possible to store multiple parts in one fzpz (Fritzing part package). This will make it more convenient to handle and share a group of parts. Older versions of Fritzing should show an error message and only load the first part in the file. So it will take a while until this feature becomes fully usable.

New parts

The majority of new parts have been created in the forum and can be found there. However, besides fixing issues with some parts, we also integrated a few to the core library.

  • Raspberry PI 4B
  • Kameleon STM32F board
  • Voltage regulators
  • Heltec Wifi Lora 32 V2
  • HiFive1
  • More predefined capacitors

Updated software stacks

We updated to a newer version of C++ and Qt5 libraries. On Mac, we use the 5.15.2 release of Qt; on Windows 5.12.10; on Ubuntu, we use the one that comes with Ubuntu 20.04. Increasing the C++ version to C++14 enabled some cleanups in the codebase, which will benefit Fritzing in the long term. This sounds like an internal thing, not important to users. But by bumping up to the latest libraries, we have fixed countless quirks and were able to discover and fix some severe bugs.

Updated translations

The following translations have received some care

  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Ukrainian

What happened to 0.9.5?

We had a development build named 0.9.5d around for a while, although we never published an official release. To avoid mixups, we skip 0.9.5 and proceed with 0.9.6.

Big thanks to developers

Joshua Scoggins, H. Phil Duby, and A. Faina!

Head to the downloads section, and we hope you will enjoy using it!