LiveCode 9.6.11 rc-1 released. Support for iOS 17

We’re delighted to bring you LiveCode 9.6.11 rc-1 today, which most importantly adds support for Xcode 15 and iOS 17 apps. This, together with fixes to the date and time formats and reworked menus means your experience on Sonoma will be much better. You can now easily build for the latest iOS versions on Sonoma.

Here is the complete list of enhancements for 9.6.11:

• Building iOS apps using Xcode 15.0.x with the iOS 17.0 SDK is now supported
• System date and time formats will now display correctly on macOS Sonoma
• Standard menu items now work correctly and do not break menus on macOS Sonoma
• Swiping a DataGrid row on Android now works as expected
• The shell function on Windows now has substantially reduced overhead when used to run short-lived commands
• The server engine will now function correctly when used as a CGI executable under IIS
• The Linux server engine’s shell function will no longer return an incorrect exit code in the result intermittently
• Getting the legacy fillBack or penBack properties of an object no longer causes a crash
• Fetching an overlong column via ODBC will no longer cause a crash with certain drivers

There’s quite an interesting story behind the shell function overhead improvement. We’ve wondered for quite some time why it took so much longer to run the LiveCode test suite on Windows, and had always put it down to Windows being less efficient than macOS and Linux at that kind of thing. Well it turns out we were wrong! The shell() function on Windows would always wait for some multiple of 0.25s for the shell command to complete meaning that even short-lived commands would take longer than expected – our automated tests use shell extensively (in excess of 50,000 times for a single run!) and most calls are short lived so this added up to a significant unnecessary overhead. Of course, fixing this issue was not as straightforward as we had hoped – as doing so uncovered a long standing flaw due to terminating threads unnecessarily. After quite a hefty amount of time spent figuring out the issue we can report that shell() on Windows is now fast and correct, and the LiveCode test suite on Windows now runs some 24 minutes faster than it did. Diagnosing this problem took some intense detective work by Mark (Sherlock) Waddingham, and we hope you find the outcome pleasing.

You can download this release from your LiveCode account, here. For instructions on locating and downloading test releases, check this lesson. Not yet got an account? Sign up for a free trial here.