Release 0.2 — Canvas interactivity, overlay support, a renderer alternative, and more!

[hecrj]

Iced is an experimental cross-platform GUI library for Rust focused on simplicity and type-safety. Inspired by Elm.

This PR marks the end of the 0.2.0 milestone and the launch of a new release!

The library has taken some steps forward since the previous release, which landed way back in April.

New features

This release contains a bunch of new functionality, internal runtime improvements, and additional subcrates. The most important new features are:

• Canvas interactivity (Canvas interactivity and Game of Life example #325)
  A trait-based approach to react to mouse and keyboard interactions in the Canvas widget.

• iced_graphics subcrate (OpenGL renderer and backend-agnostic graphics subcrate #354)
  A backend-agnostic graphics subcrate that can be leveraged to build new renderers.

• OpenGL renderer (OpenGL renderer and backend-agnostic graphics subcrate #354)
  An OpenGL renderer powered by iced_graphics, glow, and glutin. It is an alternative to the default wgpu renderer.

• Overlay support (Overlay support and PickList widget #444)
  Basic support for superpositioning interactive widgets on top of other widgets.

• Faster event loop (Rebuild widget tree only after an application update #597)
  The event loop now takes advantage of the data dependencies in The Elm Architecture and leverages the borrow checker to keep the widget tree alive between iterations, avoiding unnecessary rebuilds.

• Event capturing (Event capturing #614)
  The runtime now can tell whether a widget has handled an event or not, easing integration with existing applications.

• PickList widget (Overlay support and PickList widget #444)
  A drop-down selector widget built on top of the new overlay support.

• QRCode widget (QRCode widget #622)
  A widget that displays a QR code, powered by the qrcode crate.

Applications and examples

During this year, a bunch of awesome applications have been created with Iced! Here are some of the coolest ones:

• Airshipper, a cross-platform launcher for Veloren, an open-world multiplayer voxel RPG made in Rust.
• Ajour, a World of Warcraft addon manager with a strong focus on performance and simplicity.
• Cryptowatch Desktop, a highly customizable cryptocurrency market tracker.
• Ludusavi, a tool for backing up your PC video game save data.
• Tolstack, an open source tolerance analysis application for building and analyzing 1D geometric tolerance models.

There are also smaller ones! Take a look at the Project Showcase if you want to learn more.

On a related note, the repository has additional examples that showcase some of the new features:

• color_palette, a color palette generator, based on a user-defined root color.
• game_of_life, an interactive version of the Game of Life, invented by John Horton Conway.
• pick_list, a dropdown list of selectable options.
• qr_code, a basic QR code generator.
• scrollable, a showcase of the various size and style options for the Scrollable widget.

Feel free to try them out and report any issues!

Thank you! 🎉

Finally, I want to emphasize the work of everyone that has contributed to this release:

• @AberrantWolf updated the Radio widget to make it consistent with Checkbox (Update Radio to have the same layout members and fns as Checkbox #345).
• @aentity updated winit in iced_winit to 0.23 (update to winit 0.23 api #542) and guillotiere to 0.6 (update guillotiere to 0.6 #600).
• @AlisCode fixed some async examples by feature-gating the Command implementations (#321 Fix async examples by feature-gating Command implementations + A… #322).
• @atsuzaki added a transparent field to window::Settings (Add 'transparent' in window setting #484).
• @Azorlogh implemented conversion traits for Point, Size, and [f32; 2] (Adds From<Point> and From<Size> for [f32; 2] #558).
• @azriel91 introduced feature gates to disable the font-kit dependency (Improvement/58/feature gate font kit #370).
• @bitshifter upgraded glam to 0.9 (Upgrade glam to 0.9 & use glam's Mat4 ortho rh gl. #482).
• @clarkmoody created the color_palette example showcasing conversion traits for palette (Color Enhancements #200), improved the spacing of the PaneGrid widget (Proper Pane Grid spacing #361), and implemented scrollbar customization for the Scrollable widget (Custom Scrollbar Width #575).
• @derezzedex removed an empty bind group in the integration example (Removed empty bind group from integration example #390).
• @ethanpailes improved the documentation of theimage::Handle constructors (document that img handle constructors guess fmt #324).
• @frapa introduced support to set a window icon (Add support for setting window icon #285).
• @Imberflur fixed the Clone trait implementation for the Text widget (Make the Text widget Clone even if the Renderer isn't #363).
• @Kaiden42 implemented the From<Color> trait for Option<Background> (Implement From<Color> for Option<Background> #487).
• @Limeth fixed a typo in the hash_layout implementation of Column and Row (Fix typo in Row's and Column's hash_layout #563) and added conversion fuctions for Size and Vector (Add conversion functions to Size and Vector #583).
• @Masterchef365 added an on_release handler to the Slider widget (Add on_release message to Slider #378).
• @mobile-bungalow implemented an always_show_controls method for pane_grid::TitleBar (Added always_show_controls method to TitleBar #463).
• @MonliH removed an outdated comment in the documentation of Column and Row (Remove outdated Fill comment for Column and Row #545).
• @mtkennerly fixed a panic when pasting in a TextInput (Fix panic on paste in TextInput after programmatic modification of contents #445).
• @myfreeweb added explicit background color support, including transparency (Add custom window background/clear color (incl. transparency) support, fixes #272 #371).
• @oknozor introduced a focus method to text_input::State (Add textinput focus method #598).
• @rubik83 fixed a bug with empty ranges in ProgressBar and Slider (Account for empty ranges in Slider and ProgressBar #527).
• @sum-elier fixed the description of an error message in a window::icon (Fixes #591 DimensionsMismatch error message #592).
• @TomPridham introduced accessibility attributes to the iced_web widgets (add some accessibility features to web widgets #292).
• @twitchyliquid64 added support for always_on_top in window::Settings (Fixes #539: Allow windows to be set always_on_top #543).
• @valbendan upgraded tokio to 0.3 (upgrade tokio to latest version(v0.3) #595).
• @Vanille-N fixed the ellipse implementation of path::Builder (Calculated sweep_angle in call to lyon::geom::Arc was actually end_angle #401).
• @Veykril updated the dependencies of iced_wgpu (Update iced_wgpu dependencies #334).
• @Voker57 fixed the documentation of the progress_bar module (Replace leftover docs in progress bar module #396).
• @ZakisM fixed a bug with "select all" in a text input on macOS (This PR fixes a bug with select all (CMD + A on MacOS) when using a text_input. #605).

I really appreciate each one of these contributions and I am grateful for all of your efforts to improve the library. Thank you all!