We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 10.0.0 DP-1. Developer Preview Release
Warning: this is not a stable release. Please ensure that you back up your stacks before testing them.
Getting the Release
You can find the release in your LiveCode account area or get it via the automatic updater. To find the dp-1 test release in your LiveCode account, please scroll down to below the list of stable releases, to find your available test releases.
Release Contents
LiveCode 10.0.0 DP-1 comes with several bug fixes and some amazing new features:
Web deployment now uses WebAssembly
The WebAssembly engine is smaller, and substantially faster than the previous asm.js version. Our benchmarking has this showing as typically around 4X faster. In addition, moving to this new architecture means that the wait command now works – along with any engine functionality which internally uses wait-like functionality. Lots of LiveCode-built applications use this internally so this feature means they will all run fine in a browser.
A new “clipSnapshots” property has been added to the barcode scanner on Android
By default, if a snaphot is taken by the Android barcode scanner widget, the resulting image is clipped to the actual rect of the barcode. A new property clipSnapshots has been added which can be set to false to prevent this behavior, so that the resulting snapshot is the full image.
Support for GLES3.x acceleratedRendering has been added for Android and iOS devices
An OpenGL ES 3 implementation of the accelerated rendering backend has been added. This makes it possible for future versions of LiveCode to leverage the new technology to improve accelerated rendering performance. It also enables accelerated rendering to be used with Android emulators.
A new “bounds” option has been added to the LCB begin layer command
New syntax has been added to the Canvas library to allow specifying the drawing boundary when beginning a new layer for an effect. This should be a rectangle signifying the bounds of any drawing performed on the layer. This information allows the canvas library to limit the amount of memory allocated to the new layer by restricting the size of its backing buffer to only that area required to correctly render effects based on the given drawing bounds.
A new “device transform” property has been added to the LCB canvas object
New syntax has been added to enable getting the current transform of a canvas. The canvas device transform property returns the affine transform from logical units to backing device pixels. – A new “is valid” operator has been added to the LCB image object New syntax has been added to allow querying an image to determine if it contains valid data. The image is valid operator returns a boolean value indicating whether or not its data is valid. For the full list of all fixes, updates and enhancements please see the release notes.
Known issues
Stacks may experience redraw issues on macOS when running on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
- Stacks may experience redraw issues on macOS when running on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
- The Browser widget’s native layer is not shown in some Linux distros with Cinnamon window manager.
- The use of the Browser widget is not supported on Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit LTS yet.
Required Software
To build iOS apps with LiveCode you must have the appropriate versions of Xcode as follows:
- macOS 10.13.4: Xcode 10.1 – LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 12.1 SDK
- macOS 10.14.4: Xcode 11.3.x – LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 13.2 SDK
- macOS 10.15.4: Xcode 12.4.x – LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 14.4 SDK
- macOS 11.x. : Xcode 12.5.x – LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 14.5 SDK
- macOS 12.x. : Xcode 12.5.x – LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 14.5 SDK
There is a full list of working LiveCode/macOS/Xcode combinations here.
Note: Whilst we endeavour to release updated versions of LiveCode supporting the latest Xcode/iOS SDKs as quickly as possible; we strongly recommend disabling automatic update of Xcode or downloading the specific version of Xcode required directly from the Apple developer portal and installing it separately.
Important: From the start of April 2021, Apple is only accepting apps built using iOS14.x SDKs. This means that, if you wish to submit apps to the AppStore you will have to be running at least macOS 10.15 in order to be able to install the necessary version of Xcode.
Feedback
Please report any bugs encountered on our Quality Center. We have a forum available for discussing LiveCode here.
This is the first DP in the 10 series. Stay tuned for some great new features in upcoming DPs, including M1 Mac support, web rendering improvements and new web widgets, among other things.
Have fun!
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