3 Great New LiveCode Releases

Today I’m excited to be bringing you the long awaited LiveCode 10 GM (Stable) version. But thats not all! We have also just shipped Create 1.0 dp-4, and LiveCode 10.0.1 rc-1 with a small but significant enhancement for all iOS users out there. Lets talk about all this good news one by one. First up…

LiveCode 10 Stable

This is the final version of LiveCode Classic, and it has a feature list as long as your arm.

A brief overview of some of the areas we’ve been working on: There have been many feature adds for Web deployment including support for Web Fonts, smaller file size, support for the Map widget and easy customization of the host HTML page. LiveCode Builder has received lots a lot of love, making it easier to use for building your own widgets and wrapping externals. Android and iOS platforms have a raft of improvements to Media management, they now support suspend and resume and have better performance with smoother scrolling thanks to improvements in rendering.

Here is everything we’ve added since the last stable shipping version (9.6.13), in no particular order:

• New bytewise bit operators byteAnd , byteOr , byteXor and byteNot have been added to the engine
• The click command now supports simulating double-clicks
• The number formatting operations in LCB have been improved
• The web engine now uses browser based font management and text rendering via the standard web fonts mechanism
• The standalone zip file created when deploying to web now uses compression
• The browser widget now supports the browserProgressChanged message on iOS
• A new operator “is strictly a name” has been added which checks that a value is being represented as a name
• It is now possible to include custom headers in emails created using the MIME library
• The initializing value for constant and local declarations can now be any constant expression
• The suspend and resume messages are now supported on mobile platforms
• A new operator “is strictly a number” has been added which checks that a value is being represented as a number
• The Amazon Web Services library now supports configuring custom S3 compatible endpoints
• Browser widgets on Android can now allow access to the device’s camera and microphone
• A handler call can now specify that any trailing arguments be taken from a sequence array by using the … operator
• The params function can now return a range of parameters passed to a handler as an array
• The browser widget now uses WKWebView on macOS
• The browser widget on iOS now implements the allowsInlineMediaPlayback property, controlling whether media is played fullscreen or not by default
• The browser widget on Android and iOS now implement the mediaPlaybackRequiresUserAction property, controlling whether media can be played automatically or not
• New properties have been added to the pdf widget to allow greater control over how page content is rendered
• New features have been added to the background audio library on Android to allow greater control over audio playback
• A new operator “is strictly” has been added which checks values for equality in a strict manner
• A library has been added which gives access to the Sign-in with Google API on Android
• On Web, data required by the engine to run has been separated out into optional files thus reducing the size of the download required in many cases
• Support for working with media controls on Android has been added
• A prototype implementation of the ‘script widgets’ feature has been included
• Dictionary and sequence literal syntax has been added allowing much easier expression of array-based values
• A new constant nothing has been added to expose the special value placed in uninitialized variables
• A utility handler has been added to LCB to allow starting Android activities and receiving their results
• The map widget can now be used in apps deployed to Web
• Syntax has been added to LCB allowing encoding to, and decoding from, base64
• Syntax has been added to LCB allowing encoding to, and decoding from, a variety of text encodings
• A new option Guidelines has been added to the View menu which turns on dynamic indicators when moving and resizing controls
• A handler can now be marked as variadic by using … as the last declared parameter
• The Web-specific LCB utility function HandlerAsJSFunction can now be used on any handler
• A new set chunk has been added to LCB to allow access to specific custom property sets of script objects
• Aspect-ratio preserving options have been added to the button’s iconGravity property
• Browser widgets now implement the opaque property, controlling whether the default background is drawn or not
• New handlers have been added for easily converting between JObjectArray and List types in LCB
• The browser widget can now be used in apps deployed to Web
• It is now possible to customize the HTML page used to embed apps when deploying to Web
• A preview of a new chart widget is now available on the tools palette
• A new clipSnapshots property has been added to the barcode scanner on Android
• Support for GLES3.x acceleratedRendering has been added for Android and iOS devices
• A new bounds option has been added to the LCB begin layer command
• A new device transform property has been added to the LCB canvas object
• A new is valid operator has been added to the LCB image object
• Web deployment now uses WebAssembly

There is also a laundry list of fixes and enhancements, 67 in total. To see this list in full please check the release notes for 10.

LiveCode 10.0.1 rc-1

This is a significant release for one major reason: we have broken the link to specific Xcode versions when building for iOS. You can now have any version of Xcode installed from 12.4 onwards, and you will be able to build for the latest iOS from LiveCode 10.0.1 rc-1. An end to downloading the most enormous file I’ve ever seen to install the “correct” Xcode for your version of LiveCode. An end to headscratching when the build fails due to mysterious mismatches of versions. An end to updating the FAQ of which version runs where and is compatible with what on which version of MacOS. If you are building for iOS, you want to be using LiveCode 10.0.1 rc-1.

Other features of this release include an even smaller Web engine – 6.4mb vs 9.9mb in 10.0 and better support for Safari when building for both Web and Mobile.

In addition a number of bugs have been fixed vs 10.0:

• The htmlText property now correctly preserves unicode when present in attributes such as href and metadata
• A stack’s visible area will now update correctly when switching between cards when there is a menubar on the stack on macOS
• Exporting images to the gif format now works correctly on 64-bit windows
• The engine will no longer crash when attempting to select items from a submenu created from a definition with indent greater than a single tab
• The field’s listStyle property is now set correctly from ‘ol’ and ‘ul’ elements in htmlText
• The dboracle database driver is now supported natively on Apple architecture macs
• Unicode can now be used in the metadata options passed to ‘open printing to pdf’
• The lines returned by ‘the dnsServers’ will now always be valid IPv4 or IPv6 addresses on macOS
• Web standalones now work correctly when run in Safari browsers
• Setting numeric properties will now throw the correct error when not given a number in the correct range
• The printTitle property now supports Unicode
• The engine will no longer crash when attempting to use long, invalid, regex patterns
• Script widgets are now initialised correctly when created by cloning using modifier key + drag
• Using ‘the executionContexts’ in a handler called as a result of JavaScript callback on web now works correctly
• Images made using LCB’s pixel data image constructor now correctly handle transparency
• The ‘externalCommands’ property will no longer omit commands which use the utf-8 encoding

Going forward, we will continue to make maintenance releases of 10 to ensure support for the latest operating systems. All significant new features will be added to LiveCode Create.

Create 1.0 dp-4

Last but not least, we’ve released dp-4 of LiveCode Create. If you are using Create Cloud, this is already updated in your browser. If you have Create Native, you can download dp-4 from your account. This release now brings official support for the Safari web browser, as well as Chrome.

Other Enhancements:

• Actions no longer cause a hang when being reordered
• Custom themes are now saved
• Actions return variables can now be accessed
• Cursor issues with material field fixed
• Error fixed when switching between action bar stacks on Native
• User preferences now saved in Create Native
• Multi-layout project no longer becomes unresponsive when saved
• Color picker can now be vertical or horizontal
• Project browser no longer shifts visually when focus changes to user stack
• Relogin flow now works correctly when access token has expired
• IDE warning dialog (in particular when deleting a layout) no longer causes crash

If you haven’t been keeping up with the progress of LiveCode Create, here is a quick rundown of the major features added so far: The very first release brought you the ability to use the brand new single window IDE in the cloud and on the desktop. In dp-2 we brought you engine level JSON support. Dp-3 provided the ability to use undo/redo for recent changes to your work, plus a rework of the Actions workflow. Learn more about the new Create product line here. We’re incredibly proud to be bringing you this modern no-code platform. I hope you are excited as we are about the future!