The Uno Platform team has announced the general availability of Uno Platform 6.1, introducing a range of enhancements aimed at improving both developer productivity and cross-platform performance, with a brand new UI control for contextual toolbars. This update comes two months after the 6.0 major version release.
As stated in an official blog post, Uno Platform 6.1 introduces the new CommandBarFlyout, a versatile control that simplifies the creation of context menus and flyouts across all platforms. This addition features a visible primary command area and collapsible secondary command area. The new control also accepts the standard cross-platform API StandardUICommand like Cut, Copy or Paste, as well as the keyboard shortcuts.
Uno Platform Studio, the visual designer for cross-platform applications, has also received significant updates. The enhanced Hot Design feature now includes a Thickness Editor, allowing developers to visually adjust margins and padding in real-time. This tool is part of the broader Hot Design suite, which enables live editing of complex UIs without the need to restart the application, thereby improving the efficiency of the development workflow.
Apart from the new Thickness Editor, there are better visualizations for margins, padding and spacing of the UI elements, where they are displayed by hovering over the UI controls. The property toolbox in the editor now has blue dots for XAML-set properties and yellow dots for design-time set values (placeholders).
Under the hood, the new release has improvements in scrolling inertia, gesture recognition, and enhanced input support for iOS and Android.
As stated by the Uno team, the platform continues to be open-source and free under the Apache 2.0 license. Core features, including development tools and critical components, are guaranteed to stay open. Premium tooling, such as Uno Platform Studio, offers optional commercial support and enhancements while sustaining the development model.
For interested readers, full release notes detailing all updates and changes are available on the official Uno Platform GitHub repository.
