LiveCode 9.6.9 RC-2: Security improvements, smaller standalones and more

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.6.9 RC-2. This version comes with more than 20 bugfixes and security improvements.

Open SSL Update

This release now uses OpenSSL version 1.1.1q, which is required for submission to the Android Play Store. If you are submitting for Android please update to this version of LiveCode for your build.

Windows Certificate Update

The code signing certificate we use to sign the windows installer and LiveCode application has been renewed. This means that it will take a certain number of verifications before Windows Defender SmartScreen will not popup a dialog. Please do take the time to download, install and run the LiveCode application at least once to help ensure that it gains the necessary ‘reputation’.

Smaller Standalones on Mac, iOS and Android

Multi-architecture standalones on macOS, iOS and Android now share the unicode related data which is required for the engine to run among the different architecture binaries. This means that such standalones will be substantially smaller than previous versions.

Startup Problem on Windows

There have been sporadic reports of the LiveCode installer, ide and standalone applications failing to start up on some Windows 11, and updated Windows 10 systems. The problem appears to be to do with an incompatibility with certain printer configurations – for reference the quality report is here. Unfortunately, at this time, we have been unable to reproduce the problem in-house making it very difficult to resolve. However, this build contains an attempt at a mitigation – we hope that, on systems with such incompatible configurations – this build (and standalones built with it) will startup on these systems, but with printing disabled. We would be grateful if anyone who has a windows system which is affected by this problem could make yourself known to support@livecode.com so that we can check whether the mitigation has worked and further work with you to try and work out how to reproduce the problem ourselves so we can implement a proper fix.

Fixes and Enhancements

• The ‘Find in Docs’ item in the script editor context menu has been renamed to ‘Find in Dictionary’ to better reflect its behavior
• The correct window is now focused when a modal window is closed
• Tabs in the script editor now update properly when the name of the displayed script’s control changes
• The IDE now only creates a web deployment related temporary folder if a standalone is built for web
• Datagrids now work correctly when using a nested behavior
• The svg icon library’s addIconFamily command will now throw an error if the icon data argument has the wrong structure, and its dictionary entry now shows correct usage
• Text pasted into an ask password dialog is now obfuscated
• Anchors in regexes used in the script editor’s find and replace panel now match at line boundaries
• The PDF widget now correctly removes the scrollbar when the vScrollbar or hScrollbar property is set to false
• The version of OpenSSL used by the engine has been updated to 1.1.1q, allowing LiveCode built apps including “SSL & Encryption” to be submitted successfully to the Google Play Store
• The script editor line numbers now update correctly after the editor is scrolled using the up arrow key
• Scrolling a field containing large amounts of mixed script text no longer causes instability on Android
• The project browser now correctly places newly grouped controls into their parent group
• Deleting a stack will not cause visible rows related to other stacks to be removed from the project browser’s view
• The commands provided by mergNotify now work when running natively on an Apple architecture mac
• Stacks opened or closed while a modal is open on Windows are no longer incorrectly enabled or disabled
• Extensions with a userVisible metadata value of false will no longer be listed on the Inclusions pane of the Standalone Settings dialog
• The browser widget no longer blocks http connections in the macOS IDE and standalones
• LiveCode no longer crashes on startup when the system calendar is non-Gregorian
• The engine will no longer crash if a handler with a parameter it is called without a corresponding argument
• Setting a control’s layerClipRect property now redraws the control if it has changed
• Multi-architecture Android, iOS and macOS standalones are now substantially smaller
• The arrayDecode function now throws a specific error code when the data passed to it fails to decode

RC-3 with more bug fixes is coming

This maintenance pre-release will break from convention slightly in that there will definitely be an RC-3 with further bug fixes, including some iOS 16 related fixes we’re currently working on as well as adding support for building with the latest Xcode and iOS16 SDK.

How to get 9.6.9 rc-2

You can find the release in your LiveCode account area or get it via the automatic updater. If you are looking for the release in your account, please remember to scroll down the list of stable releases to find the test releases, underneath. Not got LiveCode yet? Sign up for a trial here.

Enjoy!