UPDATE: According to the comment below, you only have to change the timings to make lifxtend work. I will check that out myself and release a new version to adress this little issue.
In the last few weeks there were some new versions of the LIFX firmware released. LIFX itself keeps public information about this to a minimum.
I suspect this is because the new versions are not yet final. I have a lot of requests about a version of LIFXtend that works with the firmware version 1.2, but I also have reports of version 1.3 beta release.
As I don't have too much time to develop LIFXtend, I will wait until the new firmware version seems final. Then I will start to work on the updated version of LIFXtend.
While I had no look at the new firmware yet, I suspect it will change the way the LIFX bulbs communicate together. This means I will either have to dig into their source code or try to capture the relevant packets myself. This will take some time.
I am not happy with the current situation, as the users of LIFXtend want to use their bulbs to the maximum possible, so probably a lot of you already patched their bulbs to a new firmware.
For those that haven't updated yet, if you want to continue using LIFXtend with your bulbs, you'd best wait with patching your bulbs until I release a new version of LIFXtend compatible with the current firmware.
On another note: I will change the layout of my site soon, as I am not really happy with it. The whole "blog" aspect will stay the same, but striking.ch will link to a new site more centered about photography, while blog.striking.ch will stay the same.
All the links to blog.striking.ch should continue to work.
The changes to firmware mean that colour timing is now milliseconds. Once I changed the custom scenes to use milliseconds all is working well apart from Ambient which still uses the old timing so isn't as responsive as it was before.
The timed FX example I modified easily enough to work well at the times I want and the random colours scenes are now fluid with great transitions and the software quickly detects bulbs.
I have just tested this on firmware 1.3 and it works as you stated.
https://github.com/LIFX/LIFX-customer-suggestions
They want to support apps that forfill those user requests.
For Ambient I changed the settings to change the speed of colour change which has it working mostly, we need a new version of LIFXtend for that to work properly.
I have also found that it was best to uninstall LIFXtend and re-install after the firmware update as this cleared the list of bulbs etc and have not had an issue since apart from the need to occasionally power cycle the bulbs.