LiveCode 8 DP 15: What’s new?

We last gave you an update on LiveCode 8 development in November 2015, when we introduced the browser widget. But there’s been a lot of exciting enhancements added to LiveCode 8 since then, and with today’s Developer Preview 15 release, it’s a good time to look at what’s new.

64-bit standalones for Mac OS X

Thanks to funding via the community Feature Exchange, you can now deploy 64-bit Mac OS X apps using LiveCode; just select “Mac OS X 64-bit” in the standalone settings dialog. You can use LiveCode to create 32-bit, 64-bit or “universal” apps.

As part of this feature, we’ve made many improvements to the Mac engine, taking advantage of the latest Apple APIs and providing a generally improved experience for LiveCode apps on Mac OS X.

64-bit standalones currently don’t support audio recording or the “revVideoGrabber” external, but we’ll address those problems in a future release.

Faster text processing

Since the last update, we’ve spent a lot of effort on optimising text processing in LiveCode 8.  We’ve speeded up Unicode text operations by around 25%, by implementing a LiveCode-specific version of the Unicode “grapheme cluster breaking” algorithm.

On top of that, we’ve highly optimised non-Unicode, “native” text operations, by fundamentally reworking the core text-processing kernel.

In some cases, LiveCode 8 is now faster than LiveCode 6.7, despite full Unicode support.  In the near future, we’ll continue to improve LiveCode 8’s performance by optimising array operations.

More accurate text measurements

In older versions of LiveCode, the measurements used by LiveCode for laying out text (“font metrics”) were optimised for low-resolution bitmap fonts, rather than the vector fonts used on modern desktop and smartphone operating systems.

For LiveCode 8, we’ve made the field and other controls use more accurate font metrics.  Not only does the line spacing in the field matches the text display in other programs much better, but the field provides much more accurate “formattedHeight” measurements.

Native stack theming

It’s important that apps created with LiveCode can look “at home” on desktop platforms.  LiveCode 8 now uses each platform’s theming APIs to make sure that, by default, your LiveCode stacks use the same colours, fonts, and font sizes as your operating system’s native apps.

Just in case this causes layout issues for your existing apps, you can disable the new native theming by setting the new “theme” property of a stack, card or control to “legacy”.

The improved theming support has been used to update the LiveCode 8 IDE, which now has a greatly improved appearance, including new, high-quality menu bar icons.

Towards LiveCode 8!

On top of all the great features mentioned above, we’ve added a huge number of enhancements to LiveCode 8 and ironed out many bugs.  If you’re an app developer, getting started with LiveCode Builder widget development, or just learning programming, you should download the latest LiveCode 8 release now, and try it out!