A new version! We changed & added a lot again in version 4.0. Check it out below. The theme this version is missing actions and events! But we have done a lot more as well.
Full change log:
https://www.touch-portal.com/blog/post/version-change-log/change-log-version-4-0.php
New Multiple Devices Upgrade
With this Upgrade you will be able to connect multiple devices to one Touch Portal desktop. One device, the primary device, will be the device that will act on automatic navigation based on the active application on your desktop and the rest of the devices will function as a secondary devices. These will not act on automatic navigation but will be able to fully operate on their own.
The new Multiple Devices Upgrade.
All connected devices, even without the Multiple Devices Upgrade, will show in the connected device panel popup. This panel will describe the specifics about a connected device.
All your connected devices can be viewed in the connected devices panel.
The Multiple Devices upgrade is purchased and connected to your store (Google or Apple) account just like all other Upgrades in Touch Portal. This means that all devices that use an account that has purchased the Multiple Devices Upgrade can be used to connect with the desktop application. If you buy the license for both iOS and Android, it means that both can connect at the same time to the desktop. As long as the device has the license it can connect as a secondary device to the desktop.
MacOS Improvements
We have added highly requested features to MacOS which were already present on Windows already:
- Auto Navigation based on window activity - We have added the ability for our users to automatically navigate their primary device based on what application is active on their desktop.
- Low Level Key presses - You will now be able to send Low Level Key presses to control your MacOS. They are more reliable than virtual key presses and have better performance. This also eliminates the bug where moving the mouse and pressing CMD would fail to register that key press.
- Fixed the App Nap issue - No more issues with connectivity due to MacOS putting Touch Portal in sleep mode. Using this new functionality allows Touch Portal to run without ever being put to sleep, ensuring that the connection to your mobile device is always up and performant.
Adobe Lightroom implementation
Control Adobe Lightroom directly through Touch Portal without the need for shortcut combinations. Use sliders to quickly set the image adjustments in Lightroom.
All new Lightroom actions, events and connectors.
Usability Improvements
This version is packed with several usability improvements. We have been striving for this version to be the most user friendly version we have made so far.
- We have improved the Action Lists with a lot of new features and options. More details are mentioned in the specific section about the action list control.
- We have added an are-you-sure popup when you close editing a button using ESC or the close button when you have unsaved changes.
- Button IDs can be changed by the user. This allows for better and clearer IDs to make reading the flows easier and reduce the number of errors.
- We have added instant tooltips for all icon-only buttons in the application. This allows you to instantly see and read what the button does.
- We have added the option to change the location of the backups folder. This can be set in the settings.
- When editing a button, you can now apply all changes directly without having to save and close. This will also immediately update your changes on the mobile application.
- We have improved the Action Category List Control with a lot of new features and options. More details are mentioned in the specific section about the action list control.
Usability Improvements - Plug & Play Buttons
In this version, we have added a large collection of buttons that you can add without having to make them yourself. Just drag the premade control to your Page and finish the wizard. The Page Settings migrated to a button in the page control bar to make room for the plug and play buttons.
Drag the premade button to your Page.
Once dragged and dropped onto a location on the grid, the wizard will guide you through the necessary elements to specify. After you have chosen the button Theme and specified the settings for the button, it will be fully created with all actions and events present. Of course, you can always edit the full button as usual to make it fit your requirements exactly.
Example of the wizard to for an OBS source toggle button.
Usability Improvements - P&P Button Theming
You are now able to create themes for buttons that you can use for the new ready-made buttons, for the auto generated button for navigating back to the main page and for new buttons that you create to automatically get a theme set up to allow you to create and edit your button as efficiently as possible.
Create your own preset button themes for newly create buttons.
Usability Improvements - Action Category List
We have also improved the action category list:
- The category collectionin Touch Portal has grown over the years. We have added many additional categories of actions and we have also seen a great number of plug-ins being created for Touch Portal. When using a lot of them, the list can become a big pile of unorganized functionality. To fix this, we have introduced new category collections that will parent specific types of categories.
Category collection will group category for their main purpose.
- Multiple Level - Categories can have sub categories to even allow for more clear structuring. Plug-in developers can also make use of this to also integrate plug-ins in the normal structure.
- Clear search button- We have added a clear search field button inside the search area to make it easier to quickly search and use actions.
Click on the 'x' to clear the search field.
- Resizable width - In the past, you were able to set the category list to a small or wide view. With this version, we have made it resizable by dragging the side of the category list.
- Favorites always visible - The favorites are no longer affected by the search query, meaning that you will always have direct access to your favorite actions and events.
Action List - Improvements
We have made several improvements to have a better experience when building your flows.
- Improved loading performance - In previous versions, when you had a long list of actions or events, it could take seconds to load the entire list. We have greatly improved this in such a way that it now takes under 1 second to load the list, no matter how long it is.
- Drag and Drop from the Category list - You can now also drag and drop new actions to the location you want. This allows you to quickly build complex logic flows without too much hassle.
- Drag and Drop for actions in the list - Dragging actions to a different location in the same list has been changed, just drag the action and it will show a transparent version, which you can then place on the location you want.
- Drag and Drop for actions scrolling up and down the lists - When you drag an action in the list to the bottom (or the top) it will automatically scroll the list to be able to drag and drop throughout the whole list.
- Category coloring - We have also changed a few action colors to fit the category they belong to a bit better for a better visibility of the categories and actions.
- Improved text fields - all text fields and selection fields will show the full text on load. The text is no longer partially cut off.
Action List - New Themes
You already had the ability to set your own color theme for the actions lists from the settings menu. We have expanded this by also adding different styles to choose from. Choose your theme and your color scheme to get the flows to look the way you want.
Examples of the added action list themes.
Action List - Visuals Tags!
Touch Portal nows shows visual tags in the text where you use dynamic text variables. It will no longer show you long IDs, but instead it will show you the name of the state, Value or text variable.
Examples of a visual tag added in a text field.
Action List - Tools for Actions
Each action will have an action box attached to the end of the line, which will show when you hover your mouse over the action. This box has different kinds of actions you can do on that specific action, such as:
The Play Audio (advanced) action with the tool box on the right.
- Disable / Enable action - This action allows you to disable an action in your flow of actions so that it will be ignored when the flow of actions is executed.
- Documentation - This action allows you to view the documentation for that specific action, event or connector. Clicking this will redirect the user to our online documentation. The documentation will describe the action and it will also show specific notes, guides and FAQ entries to help the user use the action properly and effectively. The documentation can be found here.
- Run Action - This action, allows you to run the action. This allows you to test the action to make sure it works properly. This will be a great help when you are building complex flows.
- Go To Page - This action, which is only available on actions that handle Page functionality, will load the selected Page as the current selected Page in the desktop application.
Plug-in API changes
With API version 7 we have introduced a lot more possibilities for plug-in developers.
Check out the updated API documentation as well.
- Language-specific action descriptions. We have added the ability for plug-in devs to add translations for user faced texts in multiple places. The languages supported are the same as those supported in the main application of Touch Portal.
- Option to add tooltips to a plug-in setting that holds the following features:
- Title, optional, describes the setting in a one liner
- Body, the actual text that can be used to describe the functionality or purpose of the setting
- Link to documentation, which is optional. This is an url that you can specify that allows users to go to the proper documentation about this setting online.
- Added more options for the when-the-plugin-state-changes event;
- Contains, checks if the state contains the user value
- Does not contain, checks if the state does not contain the user value
- Begins with, checks if the state begins with the user value
- Ends with, checks if the state ends with the user value
- Matches (regex), checks if the state matches the user value, which is being processed as a regex.
- For the plug-in developers, we added specific plug-in dev tools to assist during the development of your plugin. Check the API documentation for more information.
- Actions from plug-ins can now have multiple lines.
- Migrated plug-in actions text fields to tag supported text fields.
- Touch Portal users are able to change the plug-in server IP to allow connections from plugins running on other computers in the network. More information can be found in the documentation.
- You can also update state lists in Touch Portal. These state lists need to be defined in the entry file to make them eligible for this.
- Plug-ins developers can now create subcategories for their plug-ins, allowing for better separation of plugins and their subcategories.
And we have fixed a few bugs as well:
- Fixed states with choices which were not usable as states
- Fixed When-Plugin-State-changes event not showing dynamically created states after restarting Touch Portal.
- Fixed IF Statement not showing dynamically created state after restart of Touch Portal.
- Fixed IF Statement (Extended) not showing dropdown choices for plugin state of type "choice"
- Stopped plug-ins will be listed in the log to show the plug-in was detected but not started.
- Fixed plug-in icons causing issues not following the guidelines.
- Fixed plug-in importing when previously imported but set to stopped, resulting in non-functioning plugins.
- Fixed Stopped plug-ins are not started when restarting Touch Portal.
- Fixed Change text color by plug-in state not parsing AARRGGBB formatted colors correctly
- Fixed Action list is not updated when starting, stopping and removing plug-ins.
Plug-in API V2 Documentation
We have reworked (and appended) the API documents to have a more consistent and clear structure.
The new documentation can be found here.
Changes to the logging system
We have made a lot of changes to the logging systems. The most important change is that you can
turn it off completely which will improve the performance of executing your buttons and events and reduce disk writes. But that is not all:
- We have also added the option to specify the log file size so that when you have a complex setup it will log enough information for when you need it.
- We have also made it possible to turn on or off all logging tags individually to have a log file that shows precisely what you want.
- The log view itself will be updated in real time when it is opened.
- Added Log View filter options (contains case-insensitive, matches regex)
Update system
We have also made improvements to the update system.
- Fixed update fails when library files are locked or in use.
- Added capability for the Lightroom plugin update
- Fixed Update Popup modal opens behind the main window
- Fixed properly closing the updating state when an update fails.
Import / Export Systems
We have also made improvements to the import and export systems.
- You can now add multiple Pages to one exported file.
- Added scripts as part of the export of Pages.
- Events can be exported.
- Flows can be exported.
- When importing Pages, you will have the choice how to handle the Values during the import process. You are able to ignore the Value during the import, which will not import them and use the Values already in your own setup, add them renamed, or add them and overwrite the Values with the same name currently in your setup.
- Fixed import failing and hanging when import has a Page that contains a Button that has an incomplete If Statement
- Fixed export not handling type of image correctly
- Fixed missing Value references when exporting certain actions.
- Fixed exporting Local Values as unique global Values.
- Fixed naming of imported Values not updated in already existing actions (but linked correctly).
New Language Support
We have added the Italian language to our application. We have made the translations using AI tools. If you are Italian and you notice things are not entirely correct, please let us know.
Mobile Deeplinks
For improved usability of Touch Portal on your mobile device and other systems we have introduced deeplink functionality to open a Page through deeplinks on your mobile device.
You can use the
tppage:// scheme to open Touch Portal. You can specify the path of your Page as the path of the url. If none is given it will just open Touch Portal on the default Page. If you have a Page stored in your Touch Portal setup in the sub folder
'Example' and the Page is called
'Page 1', you can open it with the full url;
tppage://Example/Page%201. Remember that an url needs to follow the proper http protocol so spaces in this case should be set with
%20 like in our example. Other characters if used in the Page path should also be converted if present. Some characters cannot be converted and should therefor not be used in the path or Page name if you want to use it with this deeplinking system.
What else?!
- We have added a bunch of new fonts to Touch Portal
- Improved the File to Content wording to make it clear that it is about storing the contents of the file into a specified Value.
- We have also added some textual parts to the application that were not translated.
- We have improved the onboarding screens to better handle the language selected and to properly show the text on all screens.
- The handling of a button press is processed faster to have lower latency.
- We added the ability to apply button changes without closing the button edit screen to improve your setup editing.
- We added a clear-all-notifications option to remove all notifications.
- We have added file association and loading when double-clicking the file
- Added option to vertically center the icon and text on top of a slider.
- Added new preview mode options, that allow you to select the dimensions of your connected devices as the preview device.
- We have added a Cooldown flow for global Events that allows you to execute actions when the event is triggered while it is still cooling down.
- With this new version, we have also added file associations to all Touch Portal extensions. A reinstallation of Touch Portal is required for this to take effect.
- We increased the Global Events queue size to 12
- Buttons can now have custom IDs
- We have changed a few maximum allowed parameters for the Graphics Upgrades
Bugfixes
Most bug fixes are already mentioned in the sections above but we also fixed some bugs not in those categories:
- When changing colors in the color picker, it will no longer go to the main window instead of the window you were on when saving or canceling
- Some texts were cut off in popup dialogs, this has been fixed.
- When deleting a button with an auto-text-updater it will no longer render the text from the auto updater
- We have fixed the title of the global Events' editor screen, incorrectly naming Flows
- Fixed all local states with selectors to show a selector instead of a text field in the Extended If statement action
- Fixed the stop all audio not stopping advanced audio playback
- Fixed Execute Flow action control shows information about Values in the search bar
- Fixed OBS streaming bit rate value shows correct bit rate.
- Fixed high IO (writes) of the application (thanks P'lumel for the fix)
- Fixed Get Url to file or state not preserving newlines
- Fixed a silent crash resulting in not all states being loaded and presented to the user
- Fixed Edge Graphics Upgrade Label Background not previewing on the desktop application.
- Fixed the search value being cleared when moving the window.
- Fixed Page Graphics Upgrade options not showing at first load.
- Fixed Page Graphics Upgrade first load visuals not getting the correct dimensions
- Improved precision rendering Edge Graphics Upgrade rows or columns
- We have added a failsafe for when the services file cannot be found.
- Fixed issue for when an image has been removed and trying to use the icon editor after removal.
- Fixed advanced audio action audio file not included in export.
- Fixed counters on Buttons not updating when context menu options were used to alter the contents of a button.
- Fixed Streamlabs Desktop filling log for German users when not used.
