Hi, All!

On some Win 10 4K systems we found that Windows would not accurately report the DPI, so we found another way for that, which seems to be working reasonably.

MacOs Sierra has been rather a bit buggy, and so has Apple XCode system to build software. We’ve had some difficulty, even taking things directly to Apple, only to hear things like this:

"Thank you for contacting Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS). 
The issue you reported was fixed in Mac OS 10.11.x.  You will have to set your deployment target 
to Mac OS 10.11 or later.
...
Best Regards,
Developer Technical Support 
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations"

Of course, that means they’ve again abandoned millions of owners of older Macs (and we mean like only four years old which cannot update past 10.9.5 !) Their reticence to keep older hardware supported, and actually break things that used to work fine means we have a bit harder job trying to keep everyone’s systems happy. We’ve fixed a couple of this type items in this release.

We have a growing cadre of professional digitizers using StitchArtist. Some of the old brands are still charging $1,000-$8,000 upgrades, allowing only single-seat licenses and haven’t kept up on the technology. One brand has hatched a scheme, merely re-branding a 30-year-old library at a lower price than they sell commercially, trying to fleece people an insane amount for it. Worse, they have insinuated they are attempting to emulate Embrilliance. It’s just laughable!

Imitation is the finest form of flattery, we hear. Whatever. We seem to be the only ones creating anything new these days. We’ve even seen our recent work being claimed in the industry as a trusty-old, tried-and-true technique! Nevermind our patents, trademarks etc.

Our trademarked Knockdown is fast becoming the Kleenex of Embroidery.

It doesn’t matter if your grandfather hired someone that took a lifetime to learn how to create a design. This is 2017 and it needs to be commonplace, even ordinary that any lady, at any age, with minimum computer and embroidery skill ought to be able to make her machine stitch properly.

The influx of commercial and professional embroiderers has us continuing to improve StitchArtist for their purposes as well. So you will see some small updates with very subtle changes, almost too technical to relate. As an example, this update includes a greater inset of inclination lines at the ends when someone used an alternating input. This allows for greater ease of overlapping things like an ‘o’ in a logo when digitizing with this input. Many readers won’t know what this means at all. But experienced digitizers coming from another system will appreciate the results of our efforts.

See, StitchArtist allows any input type to create any object, and any object can be managed regardless of input type. This flexibility is a departure from old systems. Making a satin on old systems would cause you to have a left and a right side. Well, that’s limiting. So in SA you can have any shape, edit as a shape, and add inclines as if you had entered it with a left/right. What this means is the program has to figure things out for you. It’s handy if you let it do that. We like Old School, but that doesn’t mean you always use an axe when there’s a chainsaw handy.

As we make minor adjustments, it is hard to keep it all online in the news. We literally do more than we can write about. So when you see ‘minor SA updates’ these are the types of things we do, unless we spell it out further. It’s often in response to a particular bit of a particular design that creates a difficult bit of computational geometry. This is why we do not roll the update for everyone. If you have Essentials, you don’t need this, and your program won’t bother you about it.

When we make a larger change, then we roll the version updater so the program lets you know that now is a good time to update.

Cheers!

-Brian