Release Day for Bottles 51.0: Continued bug hunting, and new "New Bottle" interface!

We love release days over here, and this one is not the exception! We have some pretty exciting new stuff, and we continue our polishing that we promised to do last month.

Let’s dive right into it!

New “New Bottle” interface

The old “New Bottle” interface had several issues:

• There wasn’t a clear indicator for which environment was chosen, especially when the Custom environment was selected and then collapsed.
• The window would increase and shrink in each page, and when the Custom environment was selected or collapsed. This caused a lot of distractions as the window would expand and shrink unexpectedly.

Both of these issues are now addressed with the brand new “New Bottle” dialog! We switched to radio buttons and changed from an expander section for the Custom environment to a “Custom” section. This section will only be editable when the Custom environment is chosen.

Quality of Life changes

There are several minor quality of life changes, that will hopefully improve the user experience:

• The Library icon has been changed from a heart to books, to represent a library.
• There is now a new toast when launching executables with “Run Executable”. Before, there wasn’t a clear indicator when the program was launching.
• Runners are now sorted according to a priority list. From the highest to the lowest priority: Soda, Caffe, Vaniglia, Lutris, and then the rest. Whenever you want to create a new bottle, or change the runner of an existing runner, everything will be displayed in order.
• Bottles can now be named without any character restrictions. This means, for example, “Assassin’s Creed”, “Sid Meier’s Civilization”, or “Paw Patrol: On A Roll” are now valid names.
• Bottles will now send a notification when a bottle has been created, but only when the window is unfocused.

Bug fixes

As always with every release of Bottles, a ton of bugs have been squashed! Here they are:

• Adding a shortcut to Steam wouldn’t add and would throw an error.
• Importing full backups wouldn’t import and would throw an error.
• A lot of various issues with the library, like empty covers and crashes.
• Various bugs regarding text encoding, in games and in Bottles
• Bottles list not being updated correctly after deleting a bottle.

There is always more stuff, and you can see the full release notes here!