v0.18.1

Release Notes

Adds support for keyboard shortcuts to navigate between panels and improvements to the Navigation panel

Keyboard Navigation

• Use Left/Right arrow keys for main navigation (along the top)
• Use Up/Down arrow keys for secondary navigation (along the left hand side)
• Directly navigate to a panel using numeric keys (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4)
• Hold down Alt and use numeric keys to navigate to views within a panel (eg. Alt+1, Alt+2, etc.)
• The Escape key can be used to dismiss the Search box on the Navigation Panel if activated

Navigation Panel

• Improved appearance of Route view
• New icon and icon color used for High Value planets in Navigation List view
• Number of Stars and Planets in a system now displayed in Route view

Known Issues

• Arrow keys cannot be used to scroll views or toggle between active panels (it's not as keyboard friendly as the in-game UI)

v0.18.0

Release Notes

This update contains a major feature update for explorers and is best illustrated using images.

In addition, it also includes some minor improvements for portrait displays / mobile screens.

Navigation Panel

Navigation List View

In the Navigation List view, bodies of interest to Universal Cartographics now have a Scan icon appear next to them.

This icon is used to highlight bodies that it's suggested you scan because they are high value. They should be worth least 100,000 CR to Universal Cartographics if the body is fully mapped - in some cases scans will be worth over 3,000,000 CR for new discoveries.

Bodies highlighted in this way are likely to be worth scanning and mapping, even if you are not the first CMDR to discover them (especially Earthlike, Ammonia and Water Worlds).

Navigation Route View

Systems in the Route view now show the number of known stars and planets in each system on the route.

If data to map the system is not available then a Scan icon is shown to suggest you scan the system and use a tool that logs the data back to ESDM / EDDN.

Note: In some cases EDSM might have data but it's it's not useable (e.g. the format is old), in which case it's treated the same as being missing to encourage CMDRs to go out there and scan the system and update the data.

Known issues

• When using ICARUS Terminal for exploration, you should also use a tool that reports data to ESDM and/or EDDN, such as EDDI, as ICARUS Terminal displays data from EDSM but does not currently report data back to EDSM and so the views will not update as you explore unless you are also using a tool that does update ESDM.
• In some cases the number of known stars or planets might be incorrect (e.g. if the data predates the introduction of the modern discovery scanner). Once you arrive in a system and use a Discovery Scanner you can see the percentage of data that is complete in ESDM in the System Map view (in the bottom right) which will indicate if there are bodies yet to discovered in the system.
• Using the Scan icon for two different purposes in this way across screens is potentially confusing. I will likely revise the choice of icon on one or both screens in an update in the near future.

v0.17.1

Release Notes

This update includes a range of quality of life improvements.

It also includes a very minor feature that indicates on the System Map how much of a system has been mapped in EDSM, but only if you are in the system and have performed and FSS Scan. This is useful for explorers charting previously undiscovered systems who are also using a tool like EDDI or something else that posts data to EDSM or EDDN. The intention is to iterate on this feature to make it more useful.

• Fix for System Information not handling systems with population of zero
  Not an issue with normal unpopulated systems, this is an edge case for systems where the population is explicitly listed as zero, such as systems with a detention megaship but no stations or settlements.
• System Map now displays % of system scan data in EDSM if in a system and the CMDR has done a Discovery Scan.
  Current System Scan percentage is not available, for technical reasons.
• Improvement to appearance of location text when docked or on foot, especially improved for portrait displays (e.g. phones, tablets)
• Fix for appearance of Engineer Contacts when an engineer has been unlocked but you don't have a rank with them as they have not been otherwise interacted with yet (they no longer appear dimmed out)
• Improved rendering of planetary approach suite dial
• Route view now uses 'Current System' instead of 'Current Location' for consistency with System Map view (reserving the use of Current Location in the UI to refer to a specific location such as Station, Body or location on a Body and not just a System)
• Improved appearance of Cloud Texture used for Earthlike, Water Worlds and Ammonia planets
• Minor change to test displayed when trying to run more than one instance of the app
  Ideally this doing that should tell the current process to spawn a new terminal window.

v0.17.0

Release Notes

This release contains a small mix of new functionality, bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

As it's a small update I'm just going to list them:

• Log Panel now automatically displays contents of the most recent log entry, if no log entry is currently selected
• Improved appearance of date and time in header
• Improved appearance of visited systems in Route Planner
• Improved animation for Ship Instrumentation when rendering in
• Minor improvements to appearance and resize handling of the Planetary Approach Suite indicator
• Fix for bug in current location indicator on Navigation Panel's system map when approaching a mission Point of Interest on foot
• Improved handling of location context (e.g. when docked in a settlement or station) to better future proof it
• Improved rendering timing for System Map in Navigation Panel, should help on lower powered devices
• Fixed issue with System Information box drawing over scrollbars on smaller displays
• Fix for vignette FX not being applied correctly

Known issues

• The Planetary Approach Suite indicator now looks janky in Safari

Notes

A number of other fixes and improvements were experimented with but were not completed in time or posed performance challenges on lower power devices and didn't make the cut. Some of these were useful enough that I wanted to get this update out, rather than hold it back.

Folks also might be interested to know I've started to move towards logging issues here:
https://github.com/iaincollins/icarus

While the Discussions are open on the repository the Issues are currently locked so I don't have to deal with the overhead of dealing with submissions (especially for issues I know about). Please feel free to use Discussions and link back to issues in the meantime.

v0.16.5

Release Notes

This release includes small fixes and cosmetic improvements, especially of benefit to iOS users (iPads, iPhones) and Safari users on macOS.

I'm committed to making it a great experience, it's just a bit more work due to limitations of Safari WebKit (which impacts all browsers on iOS) so it takes a bit longer to get there. iPads have great hardware, Safari WebKit just isn't quite as good as Chromium for some of the things like web based animation or applying the sort of effects ICARUS Terminal uses.

Navigation Panel

• Improvements to Route Plan view, including increased font size, better behavior on mobile and when deviating from planned route
• Improve appearance of System Information panel
• Improved text used for some system states
• Minor cosmetic tweaks to System Map on all platforms

Improvements Specifically for iOS Devices

• Stars are now shown correctly colored (but largely flat shaded) on System Map in Safari. Bodies on the System Map are still flat shaded in Safari as it does not support handling color and other CSS transforms on textures SVG images that are generated for the system map
• Workaround for issue with Safari incorrectly handling rendering of left-right swipe gradient on System Map (was persisting on screen)
• Improved routine used to identify browser on iOS so should correctly identify Chrome and Firefox on iOS. This is so that it recognizes that they are actually powered by Safari WebKit and have the same rendering limitations, and so apply the same workarounds / fallbacks so that it doesn't look terrible.

Known Issues

• Performance on iOS remains sub-optimal, even on high end devices (iPad PrO) when compared to low powered (~$100) Android devices
• There are some cosmetic issues with the rendering of the Planetary Approach Suite on older versions of iOS, but hopefully should not be an issue on more recent releases of iOS

v0.16.4

Release Notes

This minor version release includes another collection of small improvements.

This update should in particular improve the experience on iOS devices (iPads, iPhones).

Navigation Panel

• Fix for bug with System Name text not being copyable in System Map view
• Improved layout / appearance of Route Plan view
• Improved handling for display of current location System Map view, especially when on board a Station, Megaship or Fleet Carrier
• Minor improvements to appearance of System Information control on System Map view
• Adjusted contrast level of stellar objects in System Map on Firefox to bring rendering in Firefox closer to the baseline

Ship Panel

• Improvements to Ship instrumentation (text, spacing, warning lights, etc) especially for smaller displays and portrait displays

Engineering Panel

• Minor fix for unintentional text wrapping of core module text at some display sizes on the Blueprints view

Other Changes

• Improved appearance of font rendering on Firefox (reduced base font size to normalize scale of UI)
• Improved appearance of font rendering on Safari (increased base font size to normalize scale of UI)
• Workaround to improve list / data table rendering on Firefox
• Workaround to improve list / data table rendering on Safari
• Minor improvement to appearance of "Downloading" status in Launcher when downloading a new update is in progress

Note: Safari improvements impact apply to on macOS as well as all browsers on iOS as all browsers on iOS - including Chrome and Firefox - use Safari Webkit under the hood (due to Apple policy). Feature discrepancies between Safari and other browsers is why the rendering doesn't currently look as good on iPad tablets compared to Android tablets, but I am actively looking at methods to try and get closer to parity.

v0.16.3

Release Notes

This update is mostly minor refactoring of things in the Navigation Panel.

Navigation Panel

• Moved information about stations, settlements and megaships in system from title of System Map to System Information control, so that similar information about the system is grouped together.
• The number of bodies found in system is now displayed underneath the system title, which follows the same pattern used for the same information for stars within a system.
• New icon for the button that toggles the system information control.
• Minor other cosmetic improvements to the system map.
• Minor small improvements to route map, including a new icon for fuel stars, better messaging when no route is set and improved appearance on mobile displays.

Notes

I try not to move things around for the sake of it (it's annoying when things move around for no practical reason!) but as I'm evolving the UI based on what is possible / as work on functionality is completed sometimes I can see opportunities to improve things.

Partly this is a consequence of working without the benefit of a UI designer / UX research to model use cases and build out wireframes, I'm mostly building it with a rough idea of where I want to go in my head and seeing where it lands. I could step back from implementation now and again to model things before building them (which is what I would be doing if I was in a team doing this as a commercial project), but I'm having fun and it's going well so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.

As things come together it makes sense to refactor them if it becomes apparent information could be logically grouped differently on screen at a certain point, or if something feels like it isn't working as well as it could be. This can be either because it's more obvious to me over time how it could be better or because of other features that have been built since the initial release that make it possible to do something differently.

One thing that complicates this is supporting different screen resolutions and orientations. Sometimes I'll change something so that the view can work, with as few differences as possible, on both landscape displays (e.g. most desktops) and portrait devices (e.g. upright phones, tablets) and that it uses the space well in both cases - and that even if it's not 100% the same layout that the same information is visible in one form or another in both cases, with as few exceptions as possible.

If it's not apparent why I might have slightly changed something, but that's often why.

v0.16.2

Release Notes

The theme of this minor update is cosmetic improvements!

Ship Panel

• Improved handling for long ship names on small displays.
• Improved appearance and complexity of animation used to indicate when you are on board the ship and ship instrumentation is online.
• Added animation to Planetary Approach Suite and Power Distribution indicators (subtle motion to indicate they are active).
• Changed appearance of indicator lights to make the round instead of square shaped and slightly smaller.
• Improved appearance of ship instrumentation when dimmed (i.e. when not onboard).

Navigation Panel

• Added icon to indicate if a star is a fuel star or not in route view.
• Added warning icon for White Dwarf stars, Neutron stars and Black Holes in route view.

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Screenshots

v0.16.1

Release Notes

Minor improvements and bug fixes.

Ship Panel

• Fixed issue with Cargo count on Ship Instrumentation always displaying zero (even though progress bar would update correctly).
• Fixed issue with occasional flicker / redrawing of Ship Instrumentation on initial render.

Navigation Panel

• Added system Population to System Information widget on System Map view.
• Improved appearance of System Information widget. This is mostly a cosmetic change, but I think it looks more interesting (subjective).
• Filtered out "Rescue Ships" from list of megaships included in Navigation panel views. These were almost all outdated and sometimes appeared more than once depending on how many times a megaship had previously appeared in a system and the data for them was still in EDSM. They should ultimately return in a future update (along with the option to view Fleet Carriers) in a more robust manner.
• Improve animation timing of System Map view so that there is less delay and the animation duration is shorter so that the UI feels snappier.

Other

• Improved animation of list views throughout the app. This is both a change in appearance but also the mechanism for animation. It is significantly faster, looks better and scales so that animations work regardless of display size as effects are applied to all visible elements not just the first {N} items drawn on screen (something 4K monitors or portrait displays will appreciate); this also changes how animations are applied so reduces time-to-interactive for animated elements. The new animation also resembles the in-game style a bit more; although I have had to strike a balance and keep it short, simple and functional so that it works well on lower powered devices.

v0.16.0

Release Notes

I've had a bit of a break over the last month - the heat has been crushing! - but have returned to active development.

This update includes changes to the Ship Panel and the System Map.

Ship Panel

• Fixed issue with secondary navigation (on the left hand side) not highlighting correctly when focused on the first item in the list.
• Split "Status" (aka Instrumentation) and "Modules" (aka Ship Internals) views into separate views. I intend to improve on both views, especially the Modules/Ship Internals view - to suggest Engineering options and give more information about module stats.
• The Ship Status/Instrumentation panel now takes up the entire panel and auto-scales the UI, as well as being fluid and responding to different screen orientations and display ratios.
• The Ship Instrumentation now includes absolute values for Cargo and Fuel, as well as still displaying progress bars for quick at-a-glance reading.
• Toggle switches relocated to the top of the instrumentation (note: toggle switches are not yet interactive in release builds).
• Minor changes to some text labels, including the text for the 'Hardpoints' toggle is now displayed as 'Hard Points'. The former is Technically Correct but the latter allows the indicator text to wrap better on some devices/resolutions and the style is in keeping with rest of the toggle switch indicators.

There are some minor kinks in the new Ship Instrumentation at some edge case display sizes / in some browsers, but overall it seems to be working well enough to release and iterate on. I'd love to do more with the Ship Panel, including showing ship schematics and hardpoint placement and would love feedback about it.

Navigation Panel

• Improved appearance of header on System Map view, simpler, less clutter and improved clarity of information.
• Improved appearance and icons used in System Information pop up on the System Map. System scan progress will likely end up being displayed in here, and will be added to both List and Map views in future.
• Fixes to the text that displayed for various system states.
• Improved animation timing on System Map view and added subtle "swipe" effect to rendering of System Map. This also inadvertently impacted the tinting of the System Map background and has made it darker, but I like the result so left it in.

Other

• The behavior of the 'Copy' functionality (when you hover over text like a system, planet or station name, or material, commodity, etc. so you can copy it to the clipboard) has been improved. The notification message now clearly confirms exactly what text was copied. Improvements also allows the text in the UI and the text in the clipboard to differ slightly, so you can have text like "Alioth System" in the UI (which scans better) but "Alioth" is what gets copied to the clipboard (as that's more useful for copy/pasting).

Known Issues

This is not an exhaustive list, just some things are currently bugging me.

• Ship Cargo not updating in real time in some scenarios (should be listening for 'Cargo' events)
• Various issues with Station/Port/Settlement/Megaship data being incorrect in some systems. This usually (but not always) stems from incorrect data in EDSM and am looking to resolve it by incorporating local data, which will also facilitate showing which bodies have been scanned with the FSS.
• Objects that are orbiting null points in space are not very well handled in the Navigation view (they are rendered, but could be done better).
• Ship Modules inspector doesn't have a lot of information (e.g. no text or base stats) for some modules) so isn't very useful in some cases.
• Route Map view should clearly indicate up coming Neutron Stars / White Dwarf stars on the route (and not just say they are 'Fuel Stars', as that's a bit misleading) and could draw better attention when about to jump into a system that is not a fuel star.