IC3 Change History

Introduction

All changes to IC3 since its initial release are described here.

• IC3 Changes Affecting All Products
• IC3 NetManager Changes
• IC3 Designer and Player Changes
• IC3 Designer Changes
• IC3 Player Changes
• IC3 Broadcast Server Changes
• IC3 Reporter Changes
• IC3 CORIOgen EX Changes
• IC3 MyHD HDTV EX Changes
• IC3 TV Tuner EX Changes
• IC3 Video EXes Changes
• IC3 Weather EX Changes

IC3 Changes Affecting All Products

Release 7.4

• IC3 may be installed with a Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese language user-interface.
• IC3 now ships with version 4.96 of the Hasp dongle driver, for compatibility with the data-execution protection feature of certain processors that is available starting with Windows XP SP2.
• Improved performance of uploading and downloading data over FTP.
• Scala products now recognize new storage devices added after startup (e.g. USB memory keys, or new mounted network drives).
• Since Windows Update must be accessed via Internet Explorer, the installer no longer uses the system's default browser to visit Windows Update.

Release 7.3

• IC3 may be installed with a French language user-interface.
• Fixed a problem for older installations that have been updated to Release 7 or newer, where messages written to the Windows Event Log were not completely shown.
• If the top level contents file for a published script was corrupted, the script transfer software would not always be able to overwrite it with a new copy. This could occur during any script transfer, including publish, download by player, or transfer within NetManager.
• Workaround for FTP servers that claim they support resumed download but actually send the entire file again (or otherwise resume from the wrong place). The resulting file would be corrupt and is now discarded, and the download is retried.
• Fixed a case where an FTP server disconnect was not being correctly handled by the FTP client. This could cause misbehaviors such as the next job sent being discarded.

Release 7.2

• IC3 supports the use of Simplified Chinese throughout. This includes selection of Simplified Chinese typefaces, as well as the use of the MS PinYin98, MS PinYin3.0, and WuBi input method editors. Designer also supports selection of Korean and Traditional Chinese typefaces, in advance of full support for these languages.
• When a Windows system is shut down or restarted, Windows will kill all running processes. This sometimes causes the Scala watchdog to sense a problem and initiate a restart, and some drivers can hang when told to restart twice like this. As a workaround for such drivers, we now put in a delay to allow Windows to restart cleanly.
• Certain unusual FTP servers can report a download failure after the entire file is received. We now handle that case.
• After an interrupted download, certain files would be restarted instead of being resumed. (This did not affect media within scripts.)
• Added an MMOS.INI option to instruct the FTP client to set the socket "keep-alive" option on the FTP command channel. This can resolve certain command-channel timeouts that can sometimes be caused by intervening firewalls or routers. To enable this, add the following to your MMOS.INI:
  TCPIPTOOLS_FTPClientKeepAliveCommandChannel=1
• FTP with a blank password, though not recommended, is supported the way it was in Release 6.

Release 7.1

• Per Microsoft recommendation, on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and newer, the installer now configures the Internet Connection Firewall so that IC3 products have the access they need to continue to work.
• The watchdog that monitors various Scala products now distinguishes between these three incidents:
  • Abnormal termination during startup.
  • Abnormal termination during regular operation.
  • Abnormal termination during shutdown.
  by reporting a distinct error for each. This can be useful for trouble-shooting.
• Fixed a problem first seen in Release 7 where an FTP transfer could fail to time out.
• Starting with Release 7.1, Scala has improved its product version numbering. We now use "7.1" where before we would have used "7a". Most releases will use two numbers, but an interim (hotfix) release would be "7.1.1", "7.1.2", etc.
• For all Scala products, the product version and release information is now written to the log at startup, and whenever a new log is started after midnight.
• You can scroll to specific entries in the version list in the Options dialog using the keyboard.
• Fixed a rare case where a UTF-8 or Unicode file would not be recognized as such.
• Fixed some rare crashes involving very long file names.
• Hitting the Escape key while the splash screen is up will now stop the application from starting up. This can be useful, for example, on systems that auto-start the Player but no Scala key is connected.
• Fixed a problem that in some cases could cause FTP data transfer to be unusually slow.

Release 7

• Scala configuration files are always saved in ANSI (legacy-compatible) format unless they contain values that can only be represented in Unicode. In that case, Unicode UTF-8 is used.
• FTP transfers of international filenames are supported by using UTF-8 features present in many modern FTP servers, including the Scala-Direct FTP server. If the FTP server does not support UTF-8, Scala falls back to the ANSI codepage.
• The OK button on the File dialog is now ghosted when no filename is selected or when visiting a folder where files cannot be read/written.
• Fixed a "DLL initialization" error dialog that could occur during uninstall.
• On certain XP systems, the Scala key would not be recognized quickly enough at bootup. We now wait longer for the key to be recognized.
• Fixed some potential crashes using long file names.

Release 6

• All relevant and useful MMOS.INI settings are now documented in the IC3 Advanced Configuration Options document, as is the use of ScalaIntegration.dll.
• Sometimes an FTP server fails to confirm that an uploaded file has been received completely (various causes, at least some of which are legitimate). But when this happens, Microsoft's Wininet FTP client can hang for an unreasonable amount of time waiting for a signal that will not come. We now abort after a reasonable short interval.
• Improved handling when concluding an FTP file transfer — we now recognize and handle certain failures that went unnoticed before.
• The installer now creates a Start Menu shortcut to the Logs folder, to simplify locating the IC.log files for trouble-shooting.
• Various features that send email (Publish to Email, NetManager health monitoring problem notification, and Broadcast Server email reports) has been made to work with Netscape mail.
• Transfer of health monitoring log files, job command files, and job response files should be somewhat faster in some cases.

Release 5

• Certain versions of IIS do not correctly handle file names containing certain high-ASCII characters. The script transfer engine used throughout the InfoChannel network now knows how to work around this issue.
• When specifying a customization using MMOS.INI, if the last character of the value was a backslash but the value was enclosed in quotes, a literal quote was read instead of a backslash. That is, if the value was:

  	Identifier = "D:\"

  this was interpreted as D:" rather than D:\ — this is now fixed.

Release 4a

• In IC3 (up through Release 4, but now fixed), when the Scala installer installed the key driver, an additional driver component was selected that should not have been. On some systems, this additional component can cause 16-bit executables to fail to run. Since 16-bit executables are quite rare these days, the problem can remain unnoticed for some time. However, the Scala setup executables are 16-bit executables, and on such systems they will no longer run -- they will appear to do nothing, or unpack and do nothing.

  To correct this problem, you need to uninstall then correctly reinstall the key driver. The key driver installation program is called HInstall.exe and can be found in the folder where your Scala product was installed, which is often something like:

         C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>

  Where C: is the drive the product was installed to, and <Product> is one of ICDesigner3, ICDesigner, ICPlayer, NetManager, NetManagerEnterprise, or ICBroadcastServer.

  Proceed as follows:

  1. Remove the key driver by entering this command in the Start Menu Run... dialog:
     (but use the correct path for your system)

     	"C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>\HInstall" /r /kp /alldrv

  2. Reboot the computer.
  3. Re-install the key driver by entering this command in the Start Menu Run... dialog:
     (but use the correct path for your system)

     	"C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>\HInstall" /i /kp

  Another approach is described in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q254914.

Release 4

• Release 4 introduces major changes to how media is stored and sent when scripts are published or transmitted. This provides many great improvements that should be of interest in small or large networks.
  • Many improvements in data transmission speed.
  • Many improvements in data transmission robustness (handles more errors, retries in more places when appropriate, and general improvements due to battle-testing).
  • Fewer copies of each file are made as the data is moved from ICDesigner through the network to the ICPlayer.
  • If the same file is used by several different scripts, it is now only sent and stored once.
  • If you republish under a new script name, any files that were already used by the old script are no longer re-sent.
  • Publishing gathers files much faster than before, and doesn't consume huge amounts of disk space.
  • If the Publish location is in a sub-folder of the NetManager workspace location or remote workspace location, and you use the same user account to access it from Designer and NetManager, we now avoid an additional file copy. This specific setup is the new default when IC3 Designer and NetManager are installed on the same machine.
• If you install IC3 Network Manager, IC3 Designer, and IC3 Player on the same machine, new default settings make it very easy to set up and go. All products now come with default settings that support this simple configuration.

Before Release 4

• New MMOS.INI keyword

  	WIN32_RootDataFolder = "Path"

  When set, Scala data that is normally stored under the Windows-standard configuration area is stored under the specified path instead. Also the Scala temporary folder appears under the specified path.

IC3 NetManager Changes

Release 7.4

• In NetManager's System Settings, added a feature for automatic retrieval of billing logs. You can enable this feature and specify N, the number of days worth of logs that should be retrieved from the players and placed in the Transmission Workspace Location, in the folder Receive\Billing\playername . Every night after midnight, the players will compress and upload any of the last N days worth of logs that are not yet on the server. If there are no logs on the player for a past day, an empty log will be uploaded, so on the server we know there are no logged events (as opposed to a log delivery problem). The player will delete any logs older than N days.

  On the player, the mmos.ini setting

  SSHEALTH_BillingLogUploadDelayHours=h
  governs when the player performs the log upload. The player will hold off for a random amount up to h hours after startup or midnight, then connect to upload logs.

  The billing log retrieval will also retrieve log files whose name looks like:

  billYYYYMMDD_anything.log
  which can be used for automatic retrieval of custom log files as well as or instead of billing logs.
• Added a Resubmit Failed Jobs feature to the Job Status view. You can select one or more jobs in this view, then click Resubmit Failed Jobs. This will resubmit the jobs in question to those players that did not successfully receive the original job. Players that successfully received the original job will not be targeted by the resubmit.

  (Any modifications made to the job since it originally ran will not be used. That is, the job that is resubmitted matches the definition of the original.)

• When viewing large log files, the response time of the Log Viewer is more than ten times faster.
• In System Settings, the new Passive-mode FTP Enabled option tells NetManager to use passive-mode FTP, which is sometimes needed to traverse a firewall.
• In NetManager Enterprise, when you are using broadcast servers, you can now specify Use Point-to-Point Connection even for Broadcast Players when you define or edit a job. This causes the job to use the point-to-point connection you can specify for each player, rather than the broadcast connection.
• When the broadcast priority feature of Hughes package delivery is enabled, then a selector allows control over the priority of the resubmitted job. The default priority for resubmitted jobs is controlled by adding this to your MMOS.INI:
  SSERVER_HNSDefaultResubmitDeliveryPriority=n
  where n can be 0 (low priority), 1 (medium priority), or 2 (high priority).
• If you set the mmos.ini keyword
  SSERVER_EnableIPMulticastSettingsOverride=1
  then you can specify three additional data items per Broadcast Server, namely:
  • Group IP Address
  • Multicast Interface Address
  • Maximum Transmission Speed
  These effectively override the matching settings within the Broadcast Server, allowing the user to create multiple virtual Broadcast Server entries within NetManager, each pointing at the same physical Broadcast Server, but having unique values for the above properties.
• NetManager Enterprise can now officially be used console-style. This is essentially a single-user version of NetManager Enterprise, allowing functionality such as groups and broadcasting. Add this to your MMOS.INI:
  NETMANAGER_EnterpriseOnConsole=1
  then invoke the NetManagerConsole.exe application after starting the NetManager engine.
• The Problem Notification Email Address can now contain a list of comma-separated email addresses.
• Fixed a bug in Player and NetManager which prevented Chinese and Korean installations of Windows from interoperating with installations in other languages. For new networks, the fix is transparent. However, for existing Chinese or Korean networks, there are two options:
  • The legacy option allows the existing network to continue to run, but in NetManager and all current and future Players, you must add the following to each MMOS.INI file:
    SSCOMMON_ChineseAndKoreanLegacyCompatibility=1
    In the legacy option, interoperability with other languages will not be supported.
  • The modern option is the default (no MMOS.INI keyword required), but existing Chinese and Korean networks will need their Player settings and their NetManager databases and settings rebuilt. Once this is done the network will work again, and interoperability with other languages will be possible.

  The installer will detect affected systems and warn the user.

  The NetManager Install Software Update command will automatically add the MMOS.INI keyword to any affected player because in this case it is certain that the legacy option is desired (otherwise the player will become remotely broken).

• In NetManager Enterprise, if the user with View/Modify access logged out, sometimes the next user could not log in with View/Modify rights. This is now fixed.
• When the built-in FTP server rejected a connection due to too many simultaneous connections, it would respond in a way that would tell the FTP client not to bother retrying. This is now fixed.
• Reserved characters can no longer be typed into the Player name, Job name, etc., fields. (Previously, they were silently converted to underscores.)
• Fixed layout problem due to length of the translation of the Log Out text in the French version of NetManager Enterprise.
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur when submitting changes to the database.
• When using the Wait option for the Run Command task, the wait value is shown in the Jobs overview page and in the task list in the Edit Job page.
• Fixed a NetManager Enterprise bug introduced in Release 7.3 where trying to view the players in a group would list only those players not in that group.
• Fixed a bug in the top-level Job Status View where the refresh of this page could prevent the user from reaching the Job Status Details page or from performing Clear Job Status.
• When the Job Status View and the Job Status Details pages update, they no longer scroll to the top and repaint.

Release 7.3

• Very significant user-interface performance improvements in NetManager, especially for large networks.
• Very significant performance improvements in the Network Manager engine, especially for large and busy networks. Things are much faster, and various degradation-over-time problems have been fixed.
• When an abnormal termination, failure to start, or failure to shutdown is detected, the correct message is now logged. Before, part of the message said "<<No Catalog Entry>>".
• If you leave the Job Activity view visible, it no longer grows without bounds. Older activity entries are eventually aged off the top.
• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.2 where the system priority of NetManager threads was slightly lower than intended.
• User activity within NetManager is now logged to IC.log and to the Activity view. Also, startup and shutdown are explicitly logged.
• Workaround for an Internet Explorer bug where IE could crash in the Edit Job page when adding a task from a long list of files. As part of this change, handling a long list of files is much faster.
• When adding a task that needs a file from a Publish Location, and only one such location is defined, it will be pre-selected for you.
• If you change the Inactivity Timeout in NetManager Enterprise, such changes now become effective immediately.
• The Network Manager engine may be run as a service, using the SrvAny.exe tool.
• Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.2 where NetManager did not create the Receive\Transmission\Responses folder, so players were unable to upload their job responses.
• New Multithreaded FTP Enabled option on the Edit System Settings page allows NetManager to make multiple simultaneous FTP connections. This can increase efficiency and is generally a good idea unless your FTP server needs you to limit the number of connections.
• The Run Command task has a new option to Wait for Completion. This tells the player to wait for the command line to complete before performing the next task in the job. You can also specify the Maximum Wait Time, after which it will give up and report an error.

Release 7.2

• In the New Job and Edit Job pages, you can now multi-select files for the Send Content, Install File, and Install System File tasks.
• In the Jobs page, any job with more than five tasks or more than 5 players/groups is shown in a compact form that can be easily and individually expanded or collapsed. For example, it might now say:

  	[+] 145 Players, including:
  		Player X
  		Player Y
  		Player Z
  		...

• Major performance improvements in handling the the health monitoring databases. This speeds up handling of new health monitoring information as it arrives from the players, speeds up presentation of the Player Health pages, and provides faster startup and shutdown of NetManager.
• General performance improvements when working with the larger databases (players, jobs, etc.)
• When using the Install File command, the destination you specify is allowed to be a file or a folder. But if you specify a folder and include the trailing backslash, the job would appear to succeed but do nothing. This is now supported.
• NetManager activity logs no longer show entries when the built-in FTP server hits the maximum number of connections. (This could flood the display, and the players will retry anyway.)
• Fixed a potential crash upon entering the Job Status view.
• The built-in FTP server uses less system memory.
• For networks that the Broadcast Server with Hughes package delivery (the HNSPipe driver), the broadcast package priority can be controlled by adding this to your MMOS.INI:
  SSERVER_EnableHNSDeliveryPriority=1
  This will add a Broadcast Priority setting in the New Job and Edit Job page. Choose Low, Medium, or High to control how the Hughes package delivery system prioritizes the broadcast transmission.
• Fixed an occasional crash during shutdown of NetManager, if job response files were being processed at that time.
• Fixed a problem with chat in NetManager Enterprise, introduced with Release 7.1.
• The Job Status view in 7.1 slowed down processing of job-responses. In larger networks this was sometimes significant. The performance has now been significantly optimized.

Release 7.1

• NetManager has a new Job Status view, showing the progress of each job that has been triggered. At a glance, you can see:
  • Job Information showing the Time and Name of jobs that have been triggered.
  • An indicator icon as follows:
    • A green circled checkmark, for jobs that completed 100% successfully.
    • A yellow warning icon, for jobs that completed, with some failures.
    • A green arrow, for jobs that are still in progress, with no failures.
    • A green arrow plus a yellow warning icon, for jobs that are still in progress, with some failures.
  • In Progress information for each triggered job, showing the number of players for which:
    • the job is still being prepared on the Server
    • the job is Queued waiting for the player to collect it
    • the job is actively being processed by the Player
  • Completed information for each triggered job, showing the number of players that completed with Success or Failure.
  • The Total Players addressed by this job.
  Clicking on the Job Information for a particular job lists all the players of that job, and the specific status information for each.
• NetManager has new icon imagery in Health Monitoring:
  • A green circled checkmark, for players that are in contact with NetManager and have no errors (healthy players).
  • A yellow warning icon, for players that are in contact with NetManager and have reported errors (sick players).
  • A red circled X, for players that are not in contact with NetManager and are overdue to report in (dead players).
• The Player Health Log Viewer has been reworked to be much much faster, especially for large logs. (Column sorting and paging have been removed.)
• You can now Enable Resume Upload Support for the Network Manager Transmission Workspace and for the Broadcast Server folders.
• Somewhat faster communication from the Network Manager engine to the Network Manager console. Enterprise Edition is also slightly faster when communicating to the browser.
• Hitting Enter in various input fields now consistently accepts the form, as if OK was pressed.
• On the New Player and Edit Player, page, added help to the Broadcast Connection selector.
• A running copy of NetManager now remembers the Auto-Scroll? setting per-user.
• On the New Job /Edit Job page, fixed the help text on the <- Add button of the Tasks box.
• Fixed a bug where the list of logs in the Log Viewer was not always correctly sorted.
• Fixed a bug with Install File, Install System File, and Remote Software Update, where in rare circumstances sending such a job to broadcast players could fail to create a needed folder.
• In the Job Activity View, manually triggered jobs are now also in bold (like schedule-triggered jobs are).
• When installing NetManager Enterprise under Windows 2003 Server (or other systems with newer versions of IIS), the installer now registers NetManager Enterprise as a web extension. (In Release 7, this needed to be done by hand.)

Release 7

• All date display and entry in NetManager now respects regional settings for year/month/day, month/day/year, or day/month/year.
• NetManager Enterprise can now be installed on Windows 2003 Server.
• NetManager uses the new built-in FTP client, for better performance, robustness, and logging. With this new client, NetManager automatically supports Resumed download when possible.
• The automated email notification features of NetManager no longer rely on the default mailer (Outlook, etc.) because of various problems with that solution. Starting with Release 7, these features require you to specify the mail server and authentication settings to use, in NetManager's System Settings page.
• When viewing activity pages, or when in chat mode, Internet Explorer and the NetManager Console no longer make the periodic "ticking" sound.
• If you Edit Player in NetManager, and make changes without changing the password, the player's password could become corrupted. This is now fixed.
• Clicking OK in NetManager's System Configuration page with an illegal value for Network Manager Workspace Location now correctly restores the previous value rather than leaving the user stuck.
• Fixed a problem where rescanning a publish location in NetManager could show old data due to caching by the browser.
• Shift-clicking or using the context menu to select Open in New Window generally would lead to an error message. Therefore these operations are now prevented.
• Enter in the multi-line text boxes now processes the form rather than inserting a newline character.
• You can now bookmark the main NetManager page.
• Clicking on an error in the Player Health would not jump to the correct page inside the log viewer.
• Fixed a bug where if you created a player group with invalid characters, you could not edit or delete that group.

Release 6b

• If a job schedule was set to trigger "every month on the 31st", this would generate errors for months with only 30 days.

Release 6a

• Very significant speedups for systems with large numbers of players.
• When NetManager Enterprise was not installed at the root of the web server, the header of the Health Details page would sometimes refresh incorrectly. This is now fixed.
• The Health Details page was always resetting the number of records viewed. Now fixed.

Release 6

• Network Manager now integrates the functionality of an FTP server (Server-Direct FTP). Although a separate FTP server on the same or different machine is supported exactly as before, it is no longer necessary.
  Using the Server-Direct FTP offers several advantages:
  • Simpler NetManager configuration. Various settings are automatically established when Server-Direct FTP is used.
  • There is one less thing to administer. You no longer need to separately administer your IIS, Apache, etc. FTP server.
  • FTP status and activity logging is integrated into NetManager's logs, and appear in the Job Activity view in blue. Players log in to Server-Direct FTP using their player names, for even clearer logging.
  • Since Server-Direct FTP does not use a general purpose FTP server, various security restrictions are applied automatically, such as disallowing anonymous access, restricting file access to designated directories, etc. Various attempted security breaches are clearly logged.
  • Note: When using Server-Direct FTP, if you are also using IIS you will need to reassign one or the other's FTP command port.
• On the System Settings page, the choice of connection type is now labeled Send and Receive Data Via, and the choices are:
  • Server-Direct FTP: Use NetManager's built-in FTP server for sending data to and receiving data from players.
  • Custom: This choice disables NetManager's built-in FTP server, and lets you send data to and receive data from players using other mechanisms. The Custom choice can be used for any of the following circumstances:
    1. Use a shared folder to send and receive data.
       1. For Network Manager Workspace Location, specify the path to a folder for NetManager to use as its workspace location.
       2. Select a Transmission Workspace Location type of Shared Folder.
       3. Enter the shared folder path to access the Network Manager Workspace Location. This may or may not be the exact same path you typed for the Network Manager Workspace Location, but:
          • It must ultimately point to the same place.
          • It must be a shared folder path that is valid for both the players and NetManager itself to access.
    2. Use an FTP server running on the NetManager machine or elsewhere on the LAN, to send and receive data. (E.g. use Microsoft IIS, or a third-party FTP server.)
       1. For Network Manager Workspace Location, specify the path to a folder on the FTP server for NetManager to use as its workspace location.
       2. Select a Transmission Workspace Location type of FTP.
       3. Enter the URL, User Name, and Password for FTP access to the same folder.
    3. Use an off-site FTP server to send and receive data.
       1. For Network Manager Workspace Location, specify the path to a folder for NetManager to use as its workspace location.
       2. Select a Transmission Workspace Location type of FTP.
       3. Enter the URL, User Name, and Password for accessing the off-site FTP server.
       In this case, Network Manager automatically copies data back and forth between its local workspace location and the off-site FTP server.
  In Release 5 and earlier, this choice did not exist — effectively it was always Custom, and supported the same circumstances described above.
  (The group of settings governing how to send and receive data only needs to be specified in NetManager — there are no corresponding Player settings because NetManager automatically tells the players how to send and receive data.)
• In the New Player / Edit Player page, the choice of point-to-point connection is labeled Send Job Commands Via, and the choices are:
  • Local Computer (Tutorial): Signifies this player runs on the same machine as NetManager, and is used for the tutorial set-up. (Only one tutorial player is permitted, so this option does not appear if a tutorial player is already defined.)
  • Player-Direct FTP: Signifies that the job commands are pushed to the player's integrated FTP server.
  • Custom: Lets you specify either the FTP URL or the shared folder path to where the player's job commands should be sent.
  In Release 5 and earlier, this choice did not exist — effectively all players were Custom.

  Regardless of which mechanism you choose, the InfoChannel Player Configuration for that player should be set to match.

• On the System Settings page, the Network Manager's Host Name field is now part of the Transmission Engine Options because it is no longer used just for health monitoring.
• On the System Settings page, the Activity Logging Detail choices are now:
  • Errors and Problems Only
  • Low
  • Normal
  • Diagnostic
  This is more accurate, and consistent with the Player settings.
• On the System Settings page, the Heartbeat Interval and Minimum Alert Interval are now expressed in minutes for simplicity and consistency. (Any previous settings are rounded to the nearest minute, with a one-minute minimum.)
• On the System Settings page, the setting that controls the number of players from which NetManager automatically requests logs when a problem occurs is now called Maximum Player Log Retrieval on Same Error.
• The Player Health tab is now the first tab under Manage, to correctly reflect its importance.
• The Player Health details pages now includes an indication of whether the graphical engine on the player is actually playing. An icon that resembles a screen with the ICPlayer "arrow" indicates that the graphical engine is actually running. A blank screen icon indicates that the player's network engine has detected that the graphical engine has stopped. (Any Release 5 or older players show no icon in this column.)
• The problem descriptions on the Player Health details pages now include the date and time of the most recent occurrence.
• The autoscroll function of Job Activity page only scrolls to the bottom when a new event actually appears.
• Various checkboxes within the Player Health section now have tooltips.
• The Player Health: Whole Network page has been improved so that status updates appear in real-time without a full page refresh. Thus the Auto-Refresh? Refresh Now button is no longer needed and has been removed.
• When looking at a player's log in the Log File Reader, messages from the Player's network engine say netic in the Source column, while messages from the Player's graphical engine say runic.
• The Job Activity page has been improved so that activity updates appear in real-time without a full page refresh. Thus the Auto-Refresh? and Refresh Now buttons are no longer needed and have been removed. If the new Auto-Scroll? checkbox is checked then the page always scrolls to show the newest entries.
• Errors and log events that occur early during NetManager startup were not appearing in the Job Activity page. This is now fixed.
• In the New Job and Edit Job page, the user-interface for entering tasks has been simplified. Instead of a separate Send Content Task and Maintenance Tasks box, there is now a single Tasks box with the following command choices:
  • Send Main Script
  • Send Content
  • <More Commands>
  Picking <More Commands> extends the command list to include all the maintenance commands.
• The Send Main Script task now filters the file list to only only shows files with the .scb extension.
• The Install Software Update task now filters the file list to only only shows files with the .cab extension.
• Various fields that can contain large amounts of text now use multi-line text-input controls.
• The transmission of heartbeats from Players to NetManager has been made more efficient and more robust.
• Fixed potential hang/crash upon NetManager shutdown.
• The initial window height of the Network Manager Console is no longer too tall for 800x600 displays.
• Automated email notifications no longer trigger the Outlook security dialog that asks:

  	A program is trying to automatically send e-mail on your behalf.
  	Do you want to allow this?

• Buttons in the header area were sometimes not removed when you navigated to a different page. For example, the Show: Cleared checkbox from Health Monitoring could be seen in the header for the Players page.
• If the engine for the NetManager Standard Edition is restarted, the NetManager Console will return to the home page. (The Enterprise Edition already did this.)
• The Download Retry Maximum Timeout can now be raised to 9999 minutes, rather than the old 60 minute limit. (This setting is the maximum length of time a player will retry a job if another job is pending behind it.)
• Fixed a rare crash during job activity.

Release 5

• If you selected Clear Log on the Job Activity view in NetManager, sometimes no further activity was shown until you quit and restarted the network engine. (Job activity was still occurring, it just was not shown.) This is now fixed.
• If the TCP port for Network Manager health monitoring were scanned or if there were certain types of connection problem, then all future player health reports could have been blocked until the Network Manager engine was stopped and restarted.
• If Trigger At Time was used for a job to set up several triggers that differed only by day of the week (i.e. same time, month, etc. but on different weekdays), then only one trigger would occur. Now fixed.
• If the Retrieve Files job command had to retry because it did not complete the first time, the retry could end up failing for no reason. This is now fixed.
• If the Install Software Update job command fails due to a bad username or password for the player (or if the chosen account lacks administrator privileges), the error message specifically refers to that as a likely cause.
• The Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files job commands now work if the player's Point-to-Point Connection path used a drive-letter. (This typically only affected the tutorial's Sample Player.)
• Usability improvement in the New Job and Edit Job pages: in any of the areas that allow information to be added to the job (Send Content Task, Maintenance Tasks, Players not Targeted for this Job, Trigger At Time or Trigger When File Changes), if a value is selected or changed without being added to the job then the user will get a warning confirmation dialog when selecting OK.
• When starting NetManager for the first time, the health database file does not yet exist. However, NetManager was reporting this as a Server HealthDatabase.xml file not found and file is corrupt error in IC.log and into the Job Activity page. This is now fixed.
• In rare cases, health monitoring could sometimes show a partial log entry for the most recent entry. This is now fixed.
• If NetManager Enterprise was run but IIS was not found, the program would crash during exit. This is now fixed.
• In rare cases the player count on the health monitoring pages could be slightly off. This is now fixed.

Release 4a

• Starting with Release 4, we introduced a new format for how the files belonging to a script are arranged, different from the old format used in SP2 and earlier. In Release 4, if the NetManager downloads to its workspace a new format script having the same name as an old format script that it already had, some of the files would end up in the wrong place, which ultimately leads to the player not finding the files it needs. (If the script was re-sent, things would correct themselves.) This is now fixed. (R4)
• Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files now put the retrieved files or folders at the root level of the player-specific sub-folder of the Receive\Content location, rather than creating a series of sub-folders that mimic the original path on the player. (This change was in Release 4 but did not get documented at the time.)
• In NetManager, any job whose trigger explicitly included the month of October did not work. This is now fixed.
• The timeout when Network Manager tries to retrieve player logs was too short for some cases, causing retrieval to fail when it shouldn't have. The timeout value is now more reasonable.
• If NetManager is using a modem to dial out, and you send jobs to multiple players, only the jobs for the first player would usually get through. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a problem where viewing logs from within the Player Health tab could fail on certain Unix-based FTP servers.

Release 4

• Various internal changes for the new way scripts are laid out, versionated, and sent.
  (Note: Jobs that trigger when the script changes will now only trigger when the script is republished using Release 4 of ICDesigner.)
• For security, Network Manager now "seals" the transmission documents that are sent to players. Once a player has received a valid sealed transmission it will no longer accept non-sealed transmissions.
• New strategies prevent wininet "transfer in progress" error 12110.
• Formerly, once a script and its media were successfully transferred, we "trusted" that the media files remained there. We now handle if some of the media files are for example deleted or lost.
• Better handling when transferring a script whose name is the same except that it uses upper- and lower-case letters differently from a previous version.
• Catch and handle observed exceptional cases where the script appeared to be successfully transferred without errors, but certain files remained missing.
• Faster file transfers to FTP destinations.
• Faster FTP folder scanning.
• Fixed a problem seen publishing large files to a local IIS server where IIS server apparently received the FTP commands out of order.
• File transfers work to the root directory (files with no path.)
• Aggressive handling of "connection reset by host" errors (wininet error 12031) by reconnecting. This problem was observed to plague certain FTP servers, and is now handled.
• Now sends content and files directly from the source folder if no broadcasting is involved, and if the content is published in a folder that is reachable via the remote workspace path, and if the local and remote workspace folder are the same folder. Otherwise content is copied to the server workspace folders. Now sends content and files directly from source folder if the source folder path is in the "remote" folder workspace path. This will work even if the server local and remote workspace are not the same folder, but only for point to point. For broadcast the files still need to be downloaded locally so they can be added to the broadcast package file.
• FTP file transfer includes a workaround for an issue that affects certain FTP servers (IIS4 and possibly others) where after deleting a file, it still appears to be present for a while. This could have resulted in a variety of "access denied" or other hard-to-explain errors.
• The directory caching of the Serv-U FTP server can return incorrect results. Scala recommends this feature be disabled. However, if this is not possible you can enable a workaround by adding this to your MMOS.INI:

      WININET_EnableServUDirectoryCacheKludge = 1

  (The workaround will hurt media transfer performance.)

• The Network Manager home page and System Settings page has a link to an on-line tutorial. As well, you can reach this tutorial by clicking on the Network Manager logo in the upper-left corner.
• NetManager standard and NetManager Enterprise support player health monitoring.
  • If an error occurs on a player, the Network Manager server is quickly notified.
  • Players send a heartbeat message at a configurable interval, so that the Network Manager can notice if a player becomes non-responsive.
  • From the Network Manager user-interface, you can:
    • See an overview of the entire network. Players with similar problems are grouped together.
    • See the status summary of every player, or of each player affected by a particular problem.
    • Retrieve and examine logs for individual players.
    • Mark problems as resolved.
  • The Scala log, as well as the Windows application and system logs can be retrieved and examined.
  • Automatic nightly retrieval of logs is supported. NetManager keeps an archive of recent logs.
  • When a problem occurs in a healthy network, NetManager can send an email alert to an administrator.

  Error message reports have been augmented with a Problem text and code. Although the Error specifies what exactly failed, the Problem tells you the outcome and consequence of the error, to let you determine its severity. As an example, an error might be "file not found", but the Problem caused by that error is "The script did not play correctly."

  The Problem scheme is used as the primary grouping and sorting characteristic in NetManager's health monitoring views. We may in the future add additional support information, for example, steps an operator can try to address specific problems. In coming releases we will also define more Problems and categorize more errors into Problems.

• NetManager Enterprise now has broadcast options, for talking to IC3 Broadcast Server.
• The left-side frame now has two tab panels, clearly separating the Management controls from the Configuration controls. Home and Logout buttons have been redesigned.
• Network Manager now automatically cleans up expired files and scripts in the workspace folders.
• New Install Software Update job command, for sending Scala-supplied updates or hotfixes directly to a player for unattended installation and upgrade.
• New Abort Jobs in Progress job command.
• Retrieve Files command now supports wildcards and recursion into subfolders. Delete Files now also supports the ? wildcard (The * wildcard was already supported.)
• Retrieve Files, Delete Files, Install File, and Install System File now support Scala assignments in paths (things like Logs:, ScalaProgram:, and so on.)
• The Activity page shows more and better detail, including player download progress information, and more color-coding.
• Ability to sort jobs, players, errors, etc., by column.
• Configurable User Inactivity Timeout. (Set to zero to disable auto-logoff).
• Various improvements to user-interface, progress message, and error message wording.
• If a FTP server running on "this" host allows anonymous connections, we report an error at startup and periodically thereafter, because this is a potential security hole.
• Certain Network Manager System Settings changes need to be communicated to the player. If you submit changes to any of those settings, you get a reminder dialog that you need to send any job to all players for these changes to take effect.
• New configuration setting to control "Minimum Time to Keep Workspace Files".
• Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files now put the retrieved files or folders at the root level of the player-specific sub-folder of the Receive\Content location, rather than creating a series of sub-folders that mimic the original path on the player.
• Fixed crash if UNC paths were entered using forward slashes only.
• Much faster point-to-point delivery of transmission directive files.
• Fixed Delete Group problem. (Enterprise Edition only)
• Fixed problems refreshing in the chat window. (Enterprise Edition only)
• Fixed inactivity timeout problem that prevented the tab frame from reappearing, after editing a record.
• Fixed a spurious error when cleaning up files if the local and remote workspace folder are the same.
• Fixed various JavaScript errors seen on some systems when submitting/reloading databases, or triggering jobs manually.
• Fixed a problem when using the browser Back button to return into Network Manager Enterprise Edition from other web sites. (Enterprise Edition only)
• The Network Manager Standard Edition console requires that any proxy server be bypassed for local requests. The Console now detects this condition and and requests to correct it (as a condition of continuing.) (Standard Edition only)
• Limit the number of transmission directive files that can be backlogged for UNC or Win32 drive letter path delivery.
• Delete Unused Content no longer fails if a script links to a missing piece of linked content.
• File names with closing brackets are no longer erroneously rejected.
• Fixed some issues when installing the Network Manager web relative to the root of your web server. There were issues with the home directory name, and with re-installing.

Before Release 4

• If exceptionally long error messages were logged, the software could crash.
• Sometimes, when a script upload should have succeeded, it would instead fail with an error "no more files".
• After a script upload, we now do an extra check that all files made it. If somehow a file is missing in spite of the checks we already have, we now signal an error and mark the destination location as incomplete, so the operation can be retried.
• Fixed a bug that required an ICPlayer or ICDesigner key to also be attached to the Network Manager machine in order for it to process jobs.
• If you save database changes then immediately trigger a job, it was possible for the job to run with the old database values. Now fixed.
• Now when a player is disabled, future jobs will not be transmitted to the player.
• Network Manager now notices player response files more quickly.
• Now detects and reports errors if the remote receive/logs folder does not have write access.
• The default activity log detail level is now MODERATE, instead of MINIMUM.
• In certain cases, error dialogs from within Network Manager were coming up blank. This is now fixed.
• In the New Player / Edit Player page, the option formerly called
  Player's Connection to its Job Folder
  is now correctly called
  Network Manager's Connection to This Player's Job Folder
  
• The Skip Locked Files option for the Delete Files job is removed. Files that cannot be deleted because they are locked are reported as an error.
• Various clarifications in the Network Manager configuration page:
  • "Workspace Location on the Server" is now "Network Manager Workspace Location"
  • "Players' Connection to Workspace" is now "Transmission Workspace Location"
  • "Back-Channel Timeout (Hours)" is now "Player Response Timeout (Hours)"
• Network Manager Console window now remembers whether or not it was maximized.
• Sometimes, ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES (Windows error 00000012) was being reported. This is not a true error and will no longer generate any entries in the logs.
• NetManager Enterprise Edition installer now lets you install the web folder anywhere, and lets you request a virtual directory be created for it.

IC3 Designer and Player Changes

These changes affect both IC3 Designer and IC3 Player:

Release 7.4

• Python is a popular and powerful programming language that can be used for advanced scripting through IC3's Windows Script support. We now include an installer for Python as part of Designer and Player, and on the Support CD.
• Added a workaround for frame-synchronized display updates, to benefit certain ATI systems and for VIA S3 systems. The traditional approach used to work well but broke down on ATI Radeon-based devices with recent drivers. On such systems, the drivers end up consuming excessive CPU which badly impacts performance. The VIA S3 chipset always had this issue. To enable the workaround, add the following to your MMOS.INI file:
  XDRAW_SimulateFullScreenVBlankFlip=1
  A companion MMOS.INI setting can be used to fine-tune behavior:
  XDRAW_SimVBlankSleepThreshold=3
  This governs how close to the estimated start of vertical blank Scala switches to an accurate but CPU-intensive way of waiting. Setting the number too high will use too much CPU and affect performance. Setting the number too low can cause the vertical blank to be missed, producing a visual stutter. The default value of 3 milliseconds should be OK in most cases.

  Note:: If you have previously set XDRAW_AlwaysSingleBuffer=1 (the previous workaround), remove that before trying this new option.

• The format of the Weekday variable of the Timing EX can now be set to Use Windows Regional Options, so that weekday names appear in the same language as Windows.
• You can now add an optional IgnoreMissingDestination(On) suboption to the GotoExpr() and UseExpr() commands. This suppresses an error if the destination event does not exist.
• New Movie.Duration() function returns the length of a given movie file in milliseconds.
• Thai TIS-620 (Thai ANSI) fonts are once again supported. This worked in Release 6, but required additional internal changes due to Unicode support.
  (Note that Thai Unicode fonts continue to not be supported — you must use Thai ANSI fonts.)
• The installer now includes various fonts from the Bitstream Vera family. Bitstream Vera Sans is the new default typeface in Designer.
• Fixed a caching bug whereby if you reuse a versionated picture or sound file while you're still using a copy, it might not pick up the changed version.
• Fixed a crash observed when certain wipes were used on top of a MovieClip or TextCrawl.
• Player used to record a harmless but confusing error message to the Windows application log that said
  RunIC.app -Embedding is not a valid Win32 application.
  This is now fixed.
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur when the subscript ended, if a TextCrawl was on the last page of that subscript.
• Fixed a potential hang when playing a script with multiple PNG files on a multi-processor or hyperthreaded system.
• Certain video decoders don't respond to stop time requests in a timely manner, which causes the desired End Time setting to be ignored. We now detect and handle this, for the case where Overlay is off. (The detection is not possible when Overlay is on.)
• If when playing a streaming video, you encounter an error that The operation could not be performed because the filter is not running, this can be resolved by setting the MMOS.INI keyword:
  DSHOWRENDER_IgnoreIncompleteStateChange=1
  (We may enable this by default in the future)
• The mouse pointer becomes visible when a page has buttons. Fixed a bug where the mouse pointer would in some cases fail to disappear after moving to a page with no buttons.
• Fixed a rare bug in 3D wipes seen in some cases when a piece of the element was seen "edge-on".
• When re-activating a global crawl that uses a cued expression, the crawl would sometimes not request more text. This is now fixed.

Release 7.3

• Fixed a problem where playback of streaming video could hang if Windows Media Player had been set to "work offline".
• Targa file format support now includes images with alpha-channel.
• Improved word-wrapping rules for Korean Hangul text.
• The Escape key has been made more responsive on slower systems under heavy load.
• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 where Movie backgrounds with overlay on could be delayed in starting.
• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.2 where video playback could use excessive CPU, sometimes leading to audio stutter.
• Fixed a major glitch when starting to play certain WMVs as movie backgrounds with overlay off.
• Increased smoothness of playback in some cases.
• Fixed a bug on certain systems where a movieclip with outline enabled would not play.
• Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.1 where certain AVI files with Overlay on would not play.

Release 7.2

• Improved the tuning of IC3's internal thread priorities for even better smoothness of video playback and global crawl.
• Fixed some glitches with back-to-back movie and streaming video playback seen on various systems.
• Fixed some potential and rarely observed crashes with movie and streaming video playback.
• Playback of WMV files as a local Movie or MovieClip uses a more modern Microsoft component to read the file.
• When playing back a streaming video from an ASX/WMX file, we now support the case of a byte-order-mark in that file.
• Fixed a deadlock seen in some cases when using WinDVD4 to play video.
• Scala scripts with text-entry buttons now support Asian text-entry during playback within IC3 Designer and IC3 Player. If Scala is running in a window, then the full IME is available. If Scala is running in full-screen, then the helper windows are not available but the basic functionality is available by keyboard. To force ICPlayer to run as a borderless full-size topmost window on the desktop, see the DESKTOP_Borderless, DESKTOP_TopMost, and DESKTOP_CustomPosition settings in IC3 Advanced Configuration Options.
• Improved word-wrapping rules to support intelligent line breaks in Asian-language text. For all languages, some minor improvements in word-wrapping behavior for punctuation-type characters.
• The Sound EX has special logic to avoid re-playing an infinitely-looping sample that is set to not wait. On the player (or in Designer for the case where this event occurred in a subscript), the sample was sometimes replayed, leading to incorrect-sounding audio and eventual performance degradation as the samples piled up.
• Playback of YUV-based video (including MPEG, MPEG-2, and TV tuners) with overlay off is smoother on systems with Pentium 4-class CPUs.
• On systems with both Designer and Player installed, Windows Scripting again works in both products. (Starting with Release 7, it only worked in whichever product was installed last.)

Release 7.1

• Scala now supports Windows Media streaming video. For best results, Microsoft's Windows Media 9 should be installed.
  • To create a streaming video page, from the Main menu's Add pop-up, select Add Streaming Video Page
  • To create a streaming video clip, from the Design menu's Add pop-up, select Add Streaming Videoclip
  To specify the video source, type in the URL of a Windows Media stream. This can be:
  • The http:// URL to a Windows Media redirector file (which is typically a .wmx or .asx file)
  • The mms:// URL to a Windows Media video stream (which is typically a .wmv or .asf file)
  • The http:// URL to a Windows Media video stream (which is typically a .wmv or .asf file)

  In most respects, playback of streaming video is similar to playback of a local movie or movieclip file, and most of the same options apply.

• Dramatically improved back-to-back playback of Movie backgrounds, for the Overlay=off case.
• Removed a significant glitch in the global crawl that occurred at the end of an Overlay=off Movie background.
• Global crawl is even smoother when other activity is occurring.
• New SYSTEM_ShiftThreadPriority setting in MMOS.INI that can further improve global crawl smoothness. See IC3 Advanced Configuration Options for more information.
• The ScalaScript Search() function was broken in the Unicode conversion of Release 7. Now fixed.
• Minor usability improvements in the popup-button list. In particular, you can type the first letter of an item to highlight that item.
• If you click on a value field or hit its hotkey, the value is highlighted even if it is the special dash or infinity symbol. This reminds the user they can type, or use the arrow keys to select other values.
• Text elements with an Asian-language font plus a non-Latin-1 Latin font will now use the Latin font for any matching national characters (e.g. Central European, Cyrillic, etc.).
• Fixed a bug where certain corrupt AnimGIF filescould cause a crash.
• New MMOS.INI keyword

  	OPTIBASE_IgnoreHardware=on

  When set, the Optibase EX will cleanly work in the absence of the hardware. This can be useful when using the Publish Server to publish scripts with Optibase events, using a Designer that does not have the Optibase card installed.
• You can now specify any Unicode character by its hexadecimal value within a ScalaScript string by using the ^uNNNN notation.
• When a Return to Bookmark is encountered but there is no bookmark to return to, the script reports an error and continues, as documented. Formerly, the script would exit.
• The script engine now reports errors if any out-of-range parameters are found.
• Text Crawls and Global Text Crawls in legacy scripts that used non-default code pages are now loaded and saved with better backwards compatibility.
• If you select an invalid port in the Serial EX, the resulting error message is clear rather than confusing.
• Fixed a bug which in certain unusual cases could cause a Movie background to be incorrectly offset.

Release 7

• Asian Vertical Text is supported in Text elements, Text Crawls, and Global Text Crawls.
• When an Asian-language font is used for a text segment, a Latin font may also be specified. The Latin font is used for drawing any Latin characters present in a mixed piece of text. The syntax is:
  ... Font(typeface, size, Latin(typeface), ...)

  Text Crawl and Global Text Crawl support an embedded tag <latintypeface> to specify this Latin font.

• The Schedule EX now has an Options Menu where you can set the starting day of week. This affects the button-order in the Schedule EX menu, and also affects the week-number calculations.
• Wipe speed used to only be an abstract number from 1-10. This is still supported, but now you can also control a wipe's actual Duration.
• Billing EX now supports custom log text. For an event with billing enabled, if you enable the Custom Log Text? checkmark, you can enter arbitrary text on that event. The text you enter will get emitted to the billing log at the end of the line.
• New ScalaScript variables containing various product version information have been added:
  • Scala.ProductInfo (e.g., "Scala InfoChannel Designer 3/2003-12-10 English")
  • Scala.ReleaseInfo (e.g., "Release 7.1")
  • Scala.BuildInfo (usually empty)
  • Scala.Version (e.g., 307)
  • Scala.Revision (e.g., 1)
  • Scala.Build (usually 0)
• The Timing EX now supports various Windows date and time formats and calendars, as can be specified in the Windows Regional Options control panel. This provides greater flexibility including support of various Asian date and time formats.
• New player function Unicode(str), which returns the Unicode-value of the first character of str.
• New player function Unichar(num), which returns a string containing the character whose unicode value is num.
• Queue EX supports the serial protocol of the newer Nemo-Q queuing systems.
• The FileIO EX Open() function now supports an Encoding option to select the text-encoding.
• Loading of script files and wipe files is now somewhat faster.
• Fixed the Close button in the FTP URL dialog.
• Fixed a crash involving certain wipes running in parallel with a 3D-wipe.
• Fixed a rare crash with the Return to Bookmark feature.
• Canceling the WinDVD install no longer hangs setup.
• Fixed a Sound EX bug where the right-channel sample volume could be misread on certain systems.
• Fixed the CD.Prev, CD.Next, and CD.LengthTrack commands.
• If full-screen playback is minimized and then restored, the background is now properly refreshed.
• Fixed various problems with FileIO EX EndOfFile(), Position(), and WriteChars() functions, and fixed error handling in several other FileIO functions.

Release 6b

• Fixed a flash of green or black that sometimes occurred at the end of a MovieClip or Movie that used overlay.
• When a background Movie with overlay started, the beginning of the video was sometimes choppy (skipped frames). Now fixed.
• In high-color modes, the overlay key color was supposed to be a dark green, but a bright green was used instead. Now fixed.
• Fixed a bug where an MCI MPEG EX event with a specific size could sometimes draw the key color outside the specified rectangle.
• Fixed a flash of green color that potentially could occur when using TVTuner clips or backgrounds with overlay.
• Fixed a bug that caused playback to appear to hang sometimes if the Home or End keys were pressed.
• Fixed some problems with the new-for-Release 6a XDRAW_CommitToVideoBufferWithCPU=1 keyword in MMOS.INI: No longer clears part of the desktop to black, and fixes potential crash if you drag the window during playback.
• Fixed a bug where a line element would disappear if its left coordinate was zero.
• Fixed an obscure rendering bug for rectangles that were only a single pixel in size.

Release 6a

• Fixed a problem jumping to a page by number when special-events were involved.
• The Sound EX has new commands to allow a CD drive to be used for both CD-audio and data CDs. CD.Enable locks the drive so it can be used for CD-audio, and CD.Disable releases the drive for data use.
• Fixed variable-notification for various CD. variables. In some cases these variables did not generate a notification, while in other cases they would generate a notification every second even if the value was unchanged. Now they all work correctly (notify only when they change):
  • CD.TrackLength
  • CD.TrackTime
  • CD.DiscTime
  • CD.DiscLength
  • CD.Track
  • CD.MaxTracks
• Added a new Sound EX variable CD.DiscLengthMSF. It functions like CD.DiscLength, but its value is in the form mm:ss:ff rather than just mm:ss.
• Flash Clips with the Loops set to infinity did not loop. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a memory leak when using certain types of AVIs.
• Fixed a flicker at the start of an MCI MPEG EX movie.
• Fixed a rare crash when using the Queue EX with a TCP/IP connection.
• When using the MMOS.INI DESKTOP_CustomPosition keyword, no longer enforce a minimum 320x240 size.
• Added MMOS.INI XDRAW_CommitToVideoBufferWithCPU keyword. This instructs Scala to use the CPU to commit display updates to the video buffer using the CPU. This optimization can noticably reduce the time it takes to update the display on some nVidia-based cards, which helps keep the frame rate as high as possible. This optimization is most noticable when wiping in large foreground elements that cause a significant portion of the display to change from one frame to the next. Scala is investigating whether this change is also an improvement on other cards. To try it out, add this to your MMOS.INI:
  XDRAW_CommitToVideoBufferWithCPU = 1
• Fixed a problem where the Dissolve wipe was very very slow when running on certain high-color systems.
• Fixed a problem where the face, shadow, outline, etc. of a global crawl would be invisible if the chosen color was nearly true black, and the playback mode was high-color.

Release 6

• Significant internal rework to improve graphical performance. This is especially noticeable when using blending effects, and on faster video cards. Overall, things run faster (some things run very much faster). Certain specific operations may be slower than in Release 5 — Scala recommends you try a variety of scripts on representative player hardware before upgrading your players in the field.
• Implemented "keep up" logic in the graphical engine. Motions no longer slow down when the screen updates get too complex. This generally produces a better overall appearance, plus greater consistency from system to system. In many cases, effects appear to run faster, because before they never could keep up.
• InfoChannel Designer and InfoChannel Player now support playing Macromedia Flash files as clips. Using a FlashClip is similar to using MovieClips. However, a few options are not supported, including rotation and flipping. Also, we currently only support Flash clips, not Flash background animations.
• InfoChannel Designer and InfoChannel Player now support one or more Global Text Crawls, for crawling text during the entire script (or during a group of pages). In Designer, simply choose Add Text Crawl from the page's Add pop-up, then select the Global? checkmark.
  Global Text Crawl supports all the features of Text Crawl, with the exception of element opacity, layering, bevel, border, wipes, and the wait option. Global Text Crawl supports all the different data source types (file, expression, or cued expression), direction, rotation, etc. Global Text Crawl must always have a backdrop color or image. As well, within the ScalaScript all colors need to be specified in RGB syntax rather than using pens from the page's palette. The ScalaScript syntax for RGB colors is:

  	RGB($rrggbb)

  and is used in place of

  	Pen($pennum)

  where rr, gg, and bb are the hexadecimal values of the levels of red, green, and blue respectively.
  (Note: RGB() can actually be hand-authored for any color of any element, but is required for Global Text Crawl.)
• Text Crawl and Global Text Crawl now support a wide variety of embedded tags within the crawl data for controlling the appearance of crawled text:

  	<typeface = "typefacename">
  	<typesize = "pointsize">
  	<facecolor = "#rrggbb">
  	<outlinecolor = "#rrggbb">
  	<shadowcolor = "#rrggbb">
  	<undercolor = "#rrggbb">
  	<face = "On|Off">
  	<front = "On|Off">
  	<outline = "On|Off">
  	<outlinethickness = "numpixels">
  	<shadow = "On|Off">
  	<shadowoffset = "numpixels_horizontal, numpixels_vertical">
  	<under = "On|Off">
  	<underposition = "numpixels">
  	<underthickness = "numpixels">
  	<underair = "numpixels">
  	<bold = "On|Off">
  	<bolddelta = "numpixels">
  	<italic = "On|Off">
  	<italicdelta = "numpixels">
  	<extragap = "numpixels">

  Most of the above are self-explanatory. (Note that the four ...color options were added and documented in Release 4, but are included here for completeness.)
  For typefacename, specify the typeface as generally seen in saved ScalaScripts, e.g.:

  	<typeface = "Arial (Western [])">

  The <extragap> option specifies the number of extra pixel rows of gap that should be added before the next segment is crawled. This option is useful to increase spacing when using scrolls (i.e. vertical crawls).
• The Loops setting for newly created Text Crawls and Global Text Crawls now starts out at infinity.
• To disable CD-audio within the Sound EX, add
  SOUND_DisableCDAudio=1
  to your MMOS.INI file. In order to play CD-audio, the Sound EX normally has to lock the CD drive when playback begins, making the drive unavailable for CD-ROM data use. This setting ensures the drive can always be used for data, on systems that do not need CD-audio.
• When Clips, MovieClips, etc. are resized between about half and double their size, a bilinear-filtered scaling algorithm is used for improved appearance.
• In Release 5 and earlier, it was possible through obscure ways to have a script that switched display resolution. This is no longer supported.
• Alpha wipes for elements now correctly respect layers, and animations play during the alpha wipe effect.
• Fixed a case of a corrupt file crashing the picture loaders.
• Alpha wipes now can be rotated in 90-degree increments.
• The ScaleTheWall and SmoothWall wipes may now be applied to elements too.
• Global Text Crawl and Text Crawl support baseline justification. This feature is not yet exposed in the user-interface, and must be hand-scripted by adding:

  	Justify(Left, Baseline)

  (or you can use Center or Right in place of Left). In addition, you can add

  	Baseline(numpixels)

  to specify the baseline's offset from the top of the element. The primary purpose is to allow a baseline-aligned crawl which is useful when using the <typeface> tag to change typeface within a crawl, and to allow regular text elements to be relatively positioned to baseline-aligned crawls.
• The Global Text Crawl command supports the option

  	Active(booleanvariable)

  to control whether this global crawl is visible. If the ScalaScript or a VBScript or JavaScript changes the booleanvariable to false, the global crawl will be hidden. Setting the variable to true will cause the global crawl to appear. This can be used to implement an "emergency-only" crawl. This option is not yet exposed in the Designer user-interface.
• Schedule EX events that were saved by IC200 with years after 2002 now load correctly into IC3.
• Fixed various bugs in authoring and playback of buttons that have Link Sizes enabled.
• The MCI MPEG EX Options menu has been simplified because many options are no longer relevant. Removed are:
  • Display Mode
  • Use 16-bit MCI?
  • Disable DirectDraw?
  • Disable DirectSound?
  • Disable Double Buffering?
• Targa format image files were incorrectly being recognized as video clips.
• An image file in one of the lesser-used formats (e.g. Targa, TIFF) would only be recognized if it had one of the correct common extensions for that file type. Now such files are correctly recognized regardless of extension.
• Various improvements to the "script wipes" (Pushes, Reveals, and Zooms), including:
  • Various performance optimizations.
  • Fixed some rendering bugs seen when at very high wipe speeds.
  • Coordinates within wipe definitions can now use the full 32-bit integer range rather than just -128 through +127.
• When saving text elements with multiple segments, sometimes sub-options were not being correctly saved. For example, if two segments of text had different shadow opacities and shadow depths, sometimes the shadow depth of the second segment would be saved wrong.
• The DoubleVision wipe is no longer available as an Out-wipe because it does not behave correctly when used in that manner.
• For scripts that use keyboard navigation for buttons, the first button on the page will now be initially highlighted.
• Now establish a black screen quite early during playback, so that global crawls and TVTuner atoms have some place to play before the first visible page appears.
• An update to WinDVD3 fixes a crash playing MPEG-2 files or making thumbnails for them. This crash occurred on faster Pentium 4 systems. See WinDVD 3 Can Crash on Fast Systems for more details. The installers will detect if the patch is not present on a system.
• If the Queue EX fails to obtain its serial port, it would cause Designer or Player to fail to start. On the player, this would typically cause the system to reboot. Now an error is reported and the application continues.
• Upon installing Designer or Player, you now get a choice of language:
  • English
  • English (UK)
  • Central European
  • Cyrillic
  • Greek
  • Turkish
  • Hebrew
  The language choice selects a suitable default typeface for text elements and for the user-interface. For "UK English", it also sets the default spelling-dictionary for new installs. Finally, for all selections other than "English", the first day of week is set to Sunday rather than Monday. This affects the Schedule EX GUI and alters the week-number rules used by the Schedule EX accordingly.
• In the unusual case where the script's size is smaller than the display resolution (or window size), MCI MPEGs were relative to the screen/window origin, rather than the script area. This is now fixed.
• Added several new wipes. Under the Push category, added Clasp. Under the Zoom category, added Clasp, CrossCheck, CrossCheck-Out, MirrorMaze, MirrorMaze-Out, MirrorMazeRing, MirrorMazeRing-Out, Snails, Snails-Out, SqueezePlay, Swarm, Swarm-Out, and Xoom.
• Scripts having the NoAuthor attribute on the top-most cluster now load correctly (as they did in IC200), rather than report an error.

Release 5

• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 4a where given two consecutive MovieClips that both used overlay, the second one would not play.
• On systems with Windows Media Player 9, certain WMV-format files would not play as video. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a crash involving TextFile EX. The most common case was a player receiving a new script and restarting while the TextFile EX was operating.
• Fixed a crash seen with certain 3D wipes in specific conditions.
• Fixed a problem involving the MPEG EX or Optibase EX that could occur when pressing Cancel from the Options menu or from the ICPlayer Configuration application, leaving the application stuck with the CPU busy at 100%. In rare cases the same problem could occur at startup of Designer or Player.
• When using the RandomOnce or RandomAlways wipes, the starting selection is now properly random.
• Combining Mouse and Keyboard Button Controls using the Input EX now behaves correctly.
• Hitting the hotkey for a button leaves the button in highlight-state. This is incorrect when the keyboard navigation Button Controls are off. This is now fixed.
• During playback, when a text-entry button has focus, Alt-keys and the Enter key can now be used as hotkeys by other buttons.
• Now the first text-entry button on a page begins with focus.
• Certain wipes would crash if their speed setting in the ScalaScript was set to unusually high values.
• Fixed an occasional crash that could occur when using duration timing.
• Certain JPEGs that are in fact corrupt but are generally accepted by other image viewing applications now work in Scala.

Release 4a

• Certain MPEG-2 files have a "mid-stream format change" ensuring their top-to-bottom orientation is correct. Such files now play correctly in Scala.
• Fixes potential "pink flash" problem with movie clips. (R4)
• Fixed potential deadlock in movie playback. (R4)
• MovieClips with no in-wipe no longer appear to be "cut" in. (R4)
• Fixed a problem where certain MPEG-1 clips would only play once even when they were set to loop.
• Playing Movies and MovieClips using overlay did not work when running on the desktop, with the desktop set to 15-bit or 16-bit color (i.e. 32768 colors or 65536 colors or "thousands of colors"). This is now fixed.
• Preparing for playback of a movie is a bit faster, and starting at the mid-point of a movie is somewhat faster. For MPEG-2 files, this effect is even more significant.
• Fixed a problem where an element having the "Cut" out-wipe would not be removed from the screen. (R4)
• If you tried to change the Timing EX configuration (time formats, etc.), the configuration file that got saved was wrong and caused all the Timing settings to return to the default values. This is now fixed. (R4)
• If the TextFile EX encountered a line longer than 1023 characters, it would return the first 1023, drop the next character, and return the remainder of the line (up to 1023 more characters) as the next line. The TextFile EX no longer drops the next character, and now handles lines up to 10K characters in length.
• The TextFile EX no longer generates an empty file when playing a main script that contains a subscript that has a TextFile atom whose specified text file does not exist.
• Elements containing extremely long lines of text no longer crash.
• In order to best resolve some stuttering and other performance and behavior problems when using the Optibase EX, we had to switch back to techniques we used in the IC200 and ICDesigner-1 versions of this EX. Unfortunately, this loses the improvement in back-to-back performance we were trying to achieve in IC3.
  We hope to re-enable the back-to-back fixes in a future IC3 release. In the meantime, we can make available a version of the Optibase EX with good back-to-back behavior, and good performance. It is not fully battle-tested, and has a few behavior quirks. If you need this version, and are willing to satisfy yourself that it works well enough for your purposes, contact Support.
• If the current page has an "Interrupt Exactly" schedule entry, and the alarm for that entry is triggered, the page now restarts. Before it would accidentally proceed to the next page.
• Fixed rare crash with interactive buttons.
• The first Text Entry Field on a page now gets focus.

Release 4

• Various internal changes for the new way scripts are laid out, versionated, and sent.
• The naming scheme used to handle multiple versions of content files has been changed. For a file called Basename.ext, The old timestamp-based scheme

      Basename (Received 2002-04-16T22;52;11-05;00).ext

  is replaced with a simple incrementing version number placed between the filename's base-name and its extension:

      Basename;1.ext

• Lots of minor bug fixes (transparency handling, outwipe trash, rotated backgrounds and background-movies)
• Lots of performance enhancements (movies, movie clips, opacity).
• The Sigma Designs NetStream 2000 MPEG-2 card now works with the MCI MPEG EX.
• A text crawl can use different colors for different segments of text. Here is an example of the crawl data:

      This text is in the original color
      <facecolor="#ff0000">
      This will be red
      <facecolor="#ffffff">
      This will be white

  (We also support changing outlinecolor, shadowcolor, and undercolor.)
• Fixed potential hang with TextCrawls that are fed by Windows scripts.
• More correct handling of transparent pixels in true color average scaling.
• Random wipes could effectively select a Cut when this was not supposed to happen.
• 3D wipes work again for all element classes.
• Rotated Animation and Movie pages are now offset correctly.
• MovieClips now work with Alpha wipes, Script wipes, and the Dissolve wipe.
• Fixed a crash involving playing a partially transparent element larger than a page on a video mode smaller than the script's page size.
• When playing a movie background on the desktop, if you moved the window, the movie would get larger. Now fixed.
• Rotated Text, TextCrawl, and TextEntryButton elements are now drawn correctly with shadow on and face off.
• In advanced scripting, when an element command is used in a loop to create multiple elements, Wipeout commands will no longer try to wipe out elements that have already started wiping out.
• Clips with transparency, without any alpha channel, and with backdrops, will now be drawn correctly.
• Certain element drawn using pen zero will no longer carve through their backdrop pixels. Now they'll appear as if the backdrop was a separate element.
• Certain effects with alpha-blended elements now run much faster.
• Non-antialiased elements with opacity now work again on high-color displays.
• Faster rendering of elements with less than 100% opacity.
• Fixed crash in certain combinations with 3D wipes.
• Fixed crash where a MovieClip that had a wipe but now has overlay enabled. The wipe is correctly ignored now.
• Fixed audio / video stutter with Optibase EX that was seen on some machines.
• Various serial device EXes (Serial EX, Weather EX, CORIOgen EX, VCR EX, Switcher EX, ...) can now access COM ports 10 and higher.
• New wipes including peel and roll effects (PeelOff, DoublePeelOff, RollOff, DoubleRollOff, QuadRollOff, PlaneRollOff, PeelOn, DoublePeelOn, RollOn, DoubleRollOn, RollOver, UnrollStrips, ClaspSmear, SqueezeOut)
• The overall "thread priority" of the playback process has been reduced. Until this change, Windows would sometimes starve certain critical processes (e.g. USB modems) which would then lose data. To restore the original behavior, add this to your MMOS.INI:

      BELOWNORMALPRIORITYCLASS=no

• The MCI MPEG EX now supports playlists. To make a playlist, create a new script and add several individual MPEG clips as separate MCI MPEG EX Play commands. Save the resulting script as your playlist-script. Within your regular script, add an MPEG.Playlist event using the playlist-script as the file to play. The playlist-script can be included with the main script or sent as Linked Content.
• New ScalaScript variables Mouse.PrimaryButton and Mouse.SecondaryButton that represent the mouse button state.
• The Billing.PlayerName ScalaScript variable now defaults to the COMPUTERNAME environment variable value.
• Wipe parsing is about 75% faster.
• The Windows Script environment is initialized for COM apartment threaded instead of free-threaded. This is more typical of other environments.
• The Value option of button elements now successfully parses expressions containing variable references.
• Now correctly parses Button commands with no Value option.
• The Notification() ScalaScript command now parses correctly.

Before Release 4

• Script saving is much faster.
• If exceptionally long error messages were logged, the software could crash.
• If you turn transparency off for a GIF that had transparency encoded in it, the entire image will be opaque, as was the case in IC200.
• Certain combinations of operations on MovieClips that were broken before, now work. For example, altering the hue of a MovieClip that was not resized.
• Background movies that are the same size as the display mode now run much much faster.
• Fixed an interaction that caused a crash if nVidia nView was installed and running.
• Fixed a crash with the MCI MPEG EX when playback was set to "Same as Desktop".
• Serial EX now supports 16 COM ports.
• Movies in 32/24 bit play faster.
• The last line of movie clips is no longer black.
• New EX for queuing systems: Queue EX. The Queue EX is basically the equivalent of the IC200 Queue EX, and supports queueing systems from Q-Matic / Nemo-Q. (electronic ticket dispensers with dispatch to multiple customer-service desks.)
• Random Once, Random Always, and Next wipes would sometimes choose inappropriate wipes, which would result in a Cut.
• New MMOS.INI keyword

  	MEDIA_InstalledContent = "Path"

  The software will look in the specified path to locate linked content if the file could not be found in the normal location. Can be used for a network of authors who wish to have their Linked Content shared on a LAN, or for player installations with a hand-delivered (sneakernet) partition or folder tree.
• New MMOS.INI keyword

  	BELOWNORMALPRIORITYCLASS=yes

  Causes the Scala processes to run at "below normal" priority class, which may help in some cases where drivers are being starved of CPU.
• Schedule EX interrupts within subscripts again work. This actually affected all scripts on the ICPlayer, since even the main script is technically a subscript there.

IC3 Designer Changes

Release 7.4

• New documentation is included with IC3 Designer, and is also on the Support CD.
  • IC3 ScalaScript Syntax covers the syntax of all ScalaScript commands.
  • IC3 Scripting and Automation describes Windows Scripting (VBScript, JScript, ...), ScalaIntegration DLL, and the Publish Server.
• New Align and Spread options in the Design menu Edit pop-up give you various options to align or spread a group of elements.
• On the Effects tab, a new Backdrop Image option lets you set a backdrop image on any element. (You can adjust the Border values to show more of the backdrop around the element.) The backdrop image can be a bitmap or multi-tile, and can have blended transparency. This feature has some general uses, but can significantly improve the visual appearance of a global crawl. (Transparency not supported for the global crawl case.)
• In Publish to InfoChannel Network, you can now specify Skip Cleanup?, which avoids the cleanup phase after publish. This can speed up publishing. Cleaning up another time will take care of all accumulated cleaning needs.
• In Publish to InfoChannel Network, you can now specify Use Passive FTP?, which tells Designer to use passive-mode FTP, which is sometimes needed to traverse a firewall.
• The Publish Server now supports the p flag, to select passive FTP.
• The Publish Server now supports the CheckPublish interface to allow the controlling application to monitor progress. See IC3 Advanced Configuration for details.
• The Publish Server GenerateThumbnail interface no longer is limited to 512x384 sized thumbnails.
• Adding a Flash file from the main menu resizes the Flash clip to fill the page.
• When typing text, "straight quotes" are replaced with “smart quotes”. This can be controlled by the Use Smart Quotes? option in the Authoring tab of the Options menu.
• Certain codecs that cannot be used for Publish to Video are no longer listed as available choices.
• Fixed a crash in the File dialog when browsing files that have file dates in the far future.
• Publish to InfoChannel Network would include the imagery for any alpha wipes, but these would not be correctly recognized by the player. Hence the wipes would only work if they were already installed on the player. This is now fixed (affected scripts need to be republished).
• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.3 where Billing events in sub-scripts would log incorrect page and script names.
• Fixed a rare hang in the Main menu thumbnail generator.
• Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.3 where extra quotes were added to a Billing event which could affect compatibility of tools that read billing logs. Affected scripts will need to be resaved.
• Because FTP servers do not generally support filenames that begin with spaces, the Publish operation prevents this. Fixed a bug where after a publish is prevented, future publish operations would be blocked unless you manually cleaned up the right folder.
• Fixed a bug in Release 7.3 where Publish to Video fails with scripts containing certain Movies or MovieClips.
• Fixed a long-standing bug where pasting a string of spaces into a text-input field would hang.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when undoing changes to a Global Crawl.

Release 7.3

• The new Keep Ideographs Together? option that tries to avoid word-wrapping between ideographs in Asian text.
• Fixed some performance issues in handling long word-wrapped text that were introduced in Release 7.2.
• If you load a password-protected script but Cancel instead of supplying the password, Designer no longer reports a bogus "internal error" message.
• The Publish to Video Frame Rate selector now also offers 60 frames per second.
• In Publish to HTML and Publish to Web Component, the Publish! button is now ghosted until a destination path is selected.
• Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 where Publish to Video could lock up if the script contained a Movie background or a Streaming Video background.
• Fixed some Unicode-related bugs related to loading scripts containing symbol-font text, and pasting text into a symbol-font text element. These fixes allow certain Arabic workaround systems to work as they used to in Release 6 and earlier.
• Fixed a hotkey bug in popup buttons where the desired action would not be performed if you let go of the modifier key before the letter key.
• Fixed a bug where certain bad fonts could cause Designer to exit immediately when they were scrolled into view in the font popup.
• When a text selection contains different font sizes, the Control+[ and Control+] hotkeys now modify each size separately.
• In the font popup, a lock symbol indicates typefaces that have "restricted license embedding", meaning fonts that are not allowed to be published with the script.
• Changing the font size for a text crawl or text-entry button now adjusts the element height accordingly.
• Fixed a bug in the Serial EX where hotkeys were still active for buttons that did not apply to the current Command:.
• For elements that are aligned, the user-interface now shows the value of the aligned position, rather than the unaligned position.
• Fixed a bug where the element would be mispositioned if the left margin was zero.
• Fixed a problem where the underline opacity slider showed the wrong value for text crawl elements.
• Fixed a crash that could occur if the user supplied a zero-length expression for a text crawl.
• Fixed a bug where re-arranging the pages within a script sometimes did not mark the script as changed.
• Changing the background file associated with a page no longer resets the other background settings (e.g. overlay).
• Fixed a problem where changing the background of a page to a non-existent file would not report an error.
• When selecting or marquee-selecting elements on a page, the page now auto-scrolls if necessary.
• Fixed a bug where selecting an element that was scrolled partly out of view could cause the element's position to jump.
• Fixed a bug where a button would not always show the correct state.
• The Publish Server can now generate thumbnail images from a script.
• Requests to the Publish Server now queue rather than block.
• Fixed a hang in the Publish Server that could occur on dual-processor systems.
• The Publish Server can now run on systems with a 256-color desktop.
• The Publish Server may be run as a service, using the SrvAny.exe tool.
• The Publish Server now correctly handles scripts that have script errors.
• The Publish Server is now authorized by NetManager dongles too.
• Publishing a script with script errors once again reports the errors to the user.
• Fixed a bug where adding a ScalaScript as a subscript required the file extension to be lower-case. Now works in all cases.
• Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.2 where certain Unicode characters were mistaken to be non-printable characters, and thus saved in ^uNNNN form.
• Fixed a crash that could occur hitting the up or down arrow while in the Text Expression: filed for Text Crawls.

Release 7.2

• Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.1 where publishing only collected the fonts from the first segment of each Text element. If you had a text element that used more than one font, then the second and subsequent fonts would not be collected (unless those fonts were used in the first segment of some other Text element).
• When trying to save a script in ANSI format that cannot be represented in ANSI, the user is once again given an opportunity to save in Unicode UTF-8. Release 7.1 introduced a crash at this point.
• Publish to Video now remembers the last setting of the Keep Aspect option.
• Publish was incorrectly showing script size information for Publish to HTML.
• In a few cases, script size information was sometimes not shown when publishing.
• Fixed occasional random failure when using the Publish Server.
• Hitting the left or right arrow with a range of text selected now does the expected thing.
• On systems with Asian text-input enabled, when a pop-up list is open, keyboard navigation now works by temporarily disabling the IME.
• In some rare cases, a script that could have been saved in legacy format was saved in UTF-8 instead.
• Using control codes such as ^n or ^xnn in certain fields in the authoring station (e.g. Text Expression for a crawl) now works properly.
• Fixed a bug where disabling or enabling an element would not cause the page's thumbnail to be regenerated.
• Fixed a bug where a page's thumbnail would be regenerated if you visited an EX menu without making any changes.
• Shortcut files may now be dropped into Scala just like dropping regular files.
• The Wait state of a wipe is now indicated by a w symbol in the wipe buttons of the Design List menu.
• Fixed some weirdnesses selecting the RandomOnce wipe.
• The Bold option for Asian Vertical Text is now disabled.
• Fixed saving of scripts with non-printable Unicode-range characters.
• Fixed a bug where an empty text element was not always removed when it should have been.
• In the Font dialog, Symbol fonts are now shown in their own theme, instead of in each theme.
• In the Font dialog, you can hit a key to jump to the next font beginning with that letter. Fixed a bug added in Release 7.1 where using the O or C keys in this way actually caused the dialog to close (these being hotkeys for OK or Cancel).
• Fixed a crash if you hit Alt+Enter or resized the application window while the Add Text Entry Field dialog was open.
• Fixed a crash when entering the Background EX menu after selecting pages of different type (e.g. a picture and a movie background).
• Fixed a crash saving a script after ungrouping a group that contained references to functions or environment variables.
• Fixed a crash that could occur saving certain scripts with Billing EX events.
• The settings of the opacity sliders for text crawls were not being properly shown in the user-interface after saving and reloading a script.

Release 7.1

• New Paste Format feature lets you copy and paste element styles. Select an element and copy it to the clipboard. Now select one or more target elements, and pick Paste Format from the Edit pop-up. This will take the styles (font, color, shadow, etc.) of the element on the clipboard, and apply them to the selected element(s).
• The new font-list popup shows the name of each font using the actual font.
• Various convenient hotkeys are available for font control:
  • Alt+F opens the font-list popup
  • Shift+Alt+F opens the classic Font dialog
  • Control+[ and Control+] decreases or increases the font size
  • Control+(numeric keypad Plus) and Control+(numeric keypad Minus) changes the font of the selected text to the previous or next font
• Hitting Control+C in an Error dialog will copy the error message to the clipboard.
• General cleanup of hotkeys, including fixing a few incorrect or duplicate hotkeys, and adding a few where they were previously missing.
• Fixed some places where hotkeys were present but not working, including:
  • Schedule EX time buttons.
  • Sound EX Track In and Out buttons.
  • Opacity tab sliders.
  • Quality slider in Publish to Video.
• Canceling a Paste Special operation while in the File dialog now works.
• In the Schedule EX, the Copy to Clipboard feature now correctly handles page names that contain quotes.
• The Entry Number button of the Schedule EX could in certain cases end up too narrow to show all possible values. Now fixed.
• The Windows Script EX no longer lists the Microsoft XML script engine as a choice, since it cannot be made to work and is anyway not useful in the Scala context.
• Fixed a bug when exporting images where the resulting bitmap would be offset.
• Fixed a bug in Release 7 where the Backdrop and Pointer buttons of the Field tab of the Design Text Entry Field menu did not work.
• Most clips do not support the Focus option, therefore it is disabled in those cases.
• The Palette Menu and the first tab of the Design menus now have a more flexible layout, to better acccomodate translations of the user-interface.
• When selecting a File to feed a Text Crawl, the file dialog defaults to showing only Text Files.
• When selecting help for variables and functions in the Branch EX, the help window now has a suitable title.
• The Publish menu once again shows script information (Publish size, font settings, etc.) This information disappeared in Release 6 and is now back.
• Fixed a spurious error during Publish, which appeared as "Error 0 while checking for matching typeface".
• Scripts that use fonts from several code pages can now be saved in ANSI, for compatibility with Release 6 and earlier.
• Fixed most cases where a toolbar button could remain highlighted erroneously.
• The initial width of each EX column now accounts for the width of the column header text in the current language.
• Fixed some cases where Publish would fail to start if you had an EX menu open.
• All the slider controls in the Sound EX now have hotkeys.
• Fixed a rare case in the Sound EX where the minus-sign for negative Pan values below -99 could be cropped away.
• The File dialog no longer converts all-uppercase file names to initial-caps.
• In the File dialog, it is no longer possible to create Custom Places buttons with various illegal paths.
• In the File dialog, entering a period as a path-component is now handled correctly.
• When hitting Enter at the end of a text element, the new element did not always inherit all the correct settings. Now fixed.
• Various Main Menu operations (such as Preview, Group and Ungroup) now work properly when an EX menu is open.
• Adding a button-preset file from the Main menu is not a legal operation, so it is now prohibited.
• Fixed some cases where the thumbnail generator might stop and not be restarted.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when publishing scripts using a long project name, or with certain advanced save options and a long script name.
• Fixed a bug where the Line Spacing of a global crawl would be reset by selecting Preview.
• In some cases, selecting Undo while editing text did not update the screen display even though the Undo operation took place.
• Undo when typing text was sometimes undoing too much in one step. Now improved.
• Setting the horizontal alignment of a text entry button now works properly.
• Now accept quotation marks in the string-value of a radio or toggle button.
• The obsolete CPU and Platform variables are no longer shown in the Branch EX.
• Wipes using the Duration feature now appear correctly during Publish to Video.
• Fixed a case where after changing the script size, Designer might still use the old size for the next play.
• Fixed a bug where a page thumbnail would be regenerated if you changed only the wipe's timing.
• Choosing a non-embeddable font as your user-interface font no longer posts a warning to the user.
• The H and D keys now work on Flashclips as well.
• It is no longer possible to alter the wipe of a locked element.
• When you paste an event that references a external variable into another script, that variable will be created as external in that script.
• Fixed a Release 7 bug where publishing a script with ASCII characters in the 0xF0-0xFF range could crash.
• Fixed a Release 7 slowdown in saving of scripts with lots of Text elements.