STS announced today that the DropTools Palette was available for download. The DropTools Palette is the easiest way to use custom controls (like image wells, intermediate progress bars, etc.) through the simple dragging and dropping of an icon from the palette onto your stack. All the installation of libraries, behavior scripts, images, and the like is taken care of automatically.

A separate site was set up for DropTools, and at that site there is exhaustive developer documentation so anyone can build their own DropTool stacks for use with the DropTools palette.

For more information, and to download the DropTools Palette (which comes with two DropTool stacks), visit the DropTools web site.

After two long years of development, Stykz 1.0 was officially released today for Mac and Windows. Stykz is a frame-based stick figure animation tool that provides an easy to use interface but with powerful tools to help animate. Stykz outputs to Animated GIF, QuickTime, or a sequence of images in GIF, PNG, or JPEG format.

For more information, visit the Stykz web site.

Runtime Revolution released a new version of Revolution today, version 4.5, and in the process changed the name of the entire "Revolution" brand with "LiveCode", including a new logo and pricing structure (press release)

New features in version 4.5 include:

• Print to PDF
• Color cursors
• Image export improvements
• Linux theme improvements
• Hundreds of other minor enhancements

For more information, visit the LiveCode site.

STS released a minor update of the XML Library, version 2.1.1. This version fixes a bug related to parsing tags with parameters separated by whitespace characters other than spaces.

For more information, visit the XML Library web page.

STS released an upgrade to StackRunner today, including a new icon! Version 2.0 now uses the Revolution 4.0 engine so it is fully comparable with the new features found in Revolution 4.0, including the Data Grid library (which is included with StackRunner by default).

For more information, visit the StackRunner web page.