Season’s greetings to everyone. We’re pleased to announce that beta 7 of Mu is now here, just in time for Christmas. Get it from the download page!

The usual caveats apply: since this is a beta release it may contain bugs or unfinished features. Please provide bug reports or feedback via GitHub.

We expect the next release to be the final version of 1.1 as we work hard to integrate all the various localization and internationalization efforts currently underway.

What’s new in this release?

  • Thanks to the ever-green @keith-packard for his contribution to ensure icons on the button bar continuously scale based on the window width. This looks really smooth and slick.
  • Tinsel laden @tmontes has made a number of contributions around tooling for internationalization (i18n) of Mu. These include using the Babel package for generating the required translation files from our source code, and updating the Makefile (and make.py) so the process can be automated.
  • Xmassy @xbecas is a new joiner to the core team and we’re very please to have him with us since he has done a huge amount of work on updating and curating the translation files needed for i18n. Thanks to his work, translators for all the other existing locales need not have to go through the string generation/update steps (he’s done that for you already!).
  • Both @xbecas and @tmontes have made extensive updates to our pt-PT (Portuguese) translation. Feliz Natal e Próspero Ano Novo.
  • This was swiftly followed by a welcome contribution by @rffontenelle the red-nosed translator, who made extensive updates to the pt-BR (Brazilian Portuguese) translation. Many thanks Rafael, you continue to demonstrate why the Brazilian FLOSS community is such a vibrant place, and we hope your work will help beginner coders in Brazil take their first steps to join your community. Boas Festas!
  • Now that the upstream PyGame / PyGameZero packages have been updated and repackaged, @tmontes has ensured we use these (rather than our own custom builds) in our installers for Windows and OSX. Many thanks to our friends and collaborators in those projects (cc/ @illume and @lordmauve).
  • Once in royal @devdanzin’s repos, stood some lowly bugs to fix. These include ensuring empty path handling is properly handled by get_save_path, correct highlighting of both f-strings and triple quoted strings in the editor widget, fixing a comment-toggling bug that deleted the first character of the next line under certain circumstances and more robust handling of environment variables. Wow, @devdanzin was on fire..! (…and has further work in development, thank you so much for your continued contributions.)
  • Carolling @carlosperate has put a huge effort in. He has triaged various crash reports, administered our continuous integration pipeline, and reviewed and merged much of the work described above. He also ensured our version numbering for Mu is no longer odd, and meets the guidelines set out in PEP440.
  • Good Tim Golden (@tjguk) fast typed out, a venv that’s crisp and even. His outstanding work on making Python virtual environments work in some of the most inhospitable computing environments ever found is miraculous. Tim’s genius is to know exactly the right intervention to make, and in this case his epic addition of -I to the Mu codebase will help ensure the user’s virtual environments are properly isolated.
  • @tmonter has updated the pup packager we use to create our installer. This should fix a problem found on the new ARM based Macs. He has also made significant progress on a cross-distro Linux package which we hope will make an appearance in the not-too-distant future.
  • Finally, Nicholas (@ntoll) promises never to do another Christmas themed changelog. 🎄🎅🎉

Wishing you all a flourishing and fulfilling 2022.