LiveCode 5 now lets you create apps with hardware accelerated graphics.This means you can now create stunning multimedia rich apps and exciting games that run faster and more smoothly than ever before on mobile platforms as well as the desktop.
The rendering speed of LiveCode 5 is up to 10x faster than its predecessor.
Other Headline Features
Not only that, we’ve brought you In-App purchasing, iOS 5 compatibility, and a brand new Learning Portal. This Learning Portal is well worth a look. Elanor got such great feedback in the Academy course, that we asked her to create these six videos together with the learning materials. Below is the first one in the series, and you can check the rest out at your leisure here.
In this first lesson we take you on a tour of LiveCode and introduce basic concepts like stacks (windows), cards (screens), objects (buttons, fields etc) and how actions and information are passed between them. We’ll also show you the various panes within LiveCode and what they all do.
What else is new?
If you’ve been reading our blog or seen our new front door you’ll know all about the headline features already. What you may not appreciate yet is all the additional work that has been done, across the board, to make LiveCode 5 the best LiveCode ever. On your behalf I’ve been digging through the release notes for the various platforms, to see what else has been done by our hard working team.
Bug fixing
Not the sexiest topic, but as every programmer knows, one more bug squished is one less sleepless night for someone, somewhere. I’ve counted up 54 bugs mentioned as fixed in the release notes across desktop, iOS and Android. Here are a handful of gems:
Desktop fixes
Fixed: Building a standalone cuts off a stack
Fixed: Wrong color used to draw on Windows if new color has same red and blue when inverted as old color
… and 31 more bugs eliminated on desktop!
Android fixes
Fixed: card/stack initialized with wrong size during Android startup.
Fixed: import/export snapshot inverts colors on Android
… and 5 more specific Android bugs gone!
iOS fixes
Fixed: allowed orientations not set to plist settings on startup on iPad.
Fixed: nested controls don’t receive touch messages
… and 18 more nasty little bugs squished here!
Android Love
You might be thinking – hey, great, LiveCode iOS gets in-app purchasing and support for iOS 5, but what’s in it for Android? A quote from our user base answers this rather well:
“The new engine works great on Android and I can attest that it makes an amazing difference. Also, visual effects are now functional, stability and memory management has been markedly improved, redraw and background pattern issues have been addressed, orientation is better supported, graphic effects (shadows, etc) now work. These are all in parity with iOS.” ~ Jacque Landman-Gay
In-App purchasing is coming very shortly to Android, it just didn’t quite make the cut for 5.0. We decided to hold it back and give it a little more polish, rather than risk shipping it in a slightly experimental form.
More features
As well as the major features, LiveCode 5 brings you Pixel Perfect Intersect and the Auto-Updater on desktop. LiveCode will now inform you when there is a new release available that you might be interested in, and you can grab your update right from inside the program. Android gets support for all the standard visual effects, and even Server gets a sneaky little feature add – support for sessions has been added.
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