LiveCode 6.1.2

6.1.2 Brings iOS 7 Support

The latest stable release offers over 30 enhancements as well as the awaited iOS 7 support

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 6.1.2. This is a stable release containing more than 30 bug fixes and support for xCode 5.0 and iOS 7. We would recommend all 6.1 users upgrade to this release. It is available for both Community and Commercial users. If you have a Commercial 6.x license this release will have automatically become available in your LiveCode account.

The principle reason for existence for this minor point release is to add support for the latest iOS, however as usual we have taken the opportunity to fix various issues and squeeze in a number of enhancements for your delight. Here’s what 6.1.2 has for you.

Engine Changes

iOS 7/Xcode 5 Support
Support has been added to the engine and IDE to allow for iOS builds using Xcode 5.0. This means that OS 10.8 users (required by Xcode 5.0) will need to have Xcode 5.0 installed and set up in LiveCode’s preferences in order to produce Arm v7 builds. Arm v6 builds will still be produced using Xcode 4.4 (the last version to support Arm v6).

The table below details the versions of Xcode LiveCode requires on each platform to produce the given build type. In order to produce universal builds both the Arm v6 and Arm v7 Xcode SDKs will be required.

In addition to the above, the new iOS 7 icon sizes can be specified in the standalone builder. They are sized as follows:

• Retina iPhone: 120×120
• iPad: 76×76
• Retina iPad: 152×152

Better Quality Printing on Mac
When printing on Mac, two things have been improved. The first is that semi-transparent groups (with default ink – copy / srcOver) will render directly rather than being rasterized first. The second is that PNG and JPEG images will pass their data directly through to the printer driver. The end result is that scaled images will print at higher resolution than they did before in many more cases.

URL Operations Sometimes Fail on Android
There is a bug in the Android Java HTTP layer which can cause URL operations to fail (https://code.google.com/p/google-http-java-client/issues/detail?id=116). This problem seems to be related to keep-alive connections, thus until this bug is addressed in Android the engine will now turn off keep-alive on startup.

Support for Arm V6 iOS Builds Dropped
The earliest version of iOS supported by LiveCode is 4.3. Since iOS 4.3 only runs on Arm v7 (and newer) devices, support for Arm v6 (and subsequently universal builds) has been dropped. This has in turn simplified the versions of Xcode a user needs to have installed in order to perform iOS device builds:

Applescript Now Works on LiveCode IDE
This issue has been fixed. It was caused by incorrect naming of the rsrc file – it was LiveCode.rsrc rather than LiveCode-Community.rsrc or LiveCode-Commercial.rsrc. (The name of the rsrc file has to match the name of the executable file within the bundle).

Key Code Parameter to RawKey Messages No Longer Always Zero on Mobile
The rawKey messages will now give pass the ASCII code of ASCII characters to rawKeyDown/Up when pressed. This is consistent with the Desktop’s handling of the rawKey messages.

Spaces No Longer Required in Date Formatting
Date format string parsing has been made less strict in its processing, now collapsing one or more spaces together to allow a ‘ ‘ in a format string to match one or more input spaces. Additionally, spaces in the input after a formatting specifier was successfully matched are ignored. With these changes, both “10:41 PM” and “10:41PM” are accepted as valid times; previously, only the former was acceptable.

Caseless Comparison Now Working Correctly on Linux
For Linux distributions having their locale set to something other than ISO8859-1, caseless comparison was not working correctly. This has been fixed.

Ensure Caseless Comparison Works on Linux Server
This problem was fixed on the Desktop as Bug 11160 and has now been iterated to the Server build.

Offline Activation Now Working in Ubuntu
The installer now does not offer to launch LiveCode after installation as root (e.g. via su or sudo) on Linux in order to prevent the product from creating its activation files with the wrong permissions. Instead, LiveCode should be launched in the normal way after installation and activation occurs then.

A full fix list and more details can be found in the release notes for this edition, here