I’m pleased to announce that SproutCore 1.7 beta is now available. This release is largely a bug fix release and the addition of some minor features so if you’re using 1.6 and like the cutting edge you should check it out. Installers are available for Mac and Windows. If you’re using RubyGems, just run gem install sproutcore --pre. A word of warning, however: if you’re using the installers the beta will overwrite any previously installed versions of SproutCore. As always, share any issues you encounter on Github Issues.

Read on for more information on the changes.

In the framework itself changes include:

• Safari Lion browser detection.

• Speed improvements

• Flag to stop PickerPane repositioning when resizing the window

• Option to enable or disable overflow in SegmentedView

• Support for autoCorrect and autoCapitalize in TextFields

• Minor improvements in SC.Statechart

• New SC globals to provide information like build mode, build number and locale.

• Lots of bug fixes

New features in the build tools include:

• When a stylesheet hits the 4096 CSS selectors limit in IE , the files will now be automatically split.

• Sprites are optimized to use less space

• Layout.js, which includes location metrics, will be always first when building the js files

• Added security feature for dev environment. By default sc-server can only be used from your local machine unless you set a flag.

Along with the following bug fixes:

• Sprites are again the default for abbot due to performance issues with data-uris in some browsers

• index.html will be minified again

• Whitelist and black list fixes

• Fixed iOS retina display styling

For a full list of all changes see the Changelogs: Framework and Build Tools.