Release 9.6.12 rc-1: iOS Privacy Manifests and more

As of today, new apps submitted to the iOS app store are required to fill out a Privacy Manifest. LiveCode 9.6.12 rc-1 and LiveCode 10 dp-8 now support this, with a default Privacy Manifest which you can edit for your specific circumstances. We’ve also fixed a number of other issues in this release.

Privacy Manifests

In these days of GDPR and users desire to know what you are doing behind the scenes, Apple has added a requirement that when you access certain areas of your users device, you tell them why you are doing it. This is pretty straightforward in practice, there is a set of codes you choose from to add to the manifest, which is then included in your standalone app.

To make this as easy as possible, LC 9.6.12 rc-1 has a default manifest included which has the commonest reasons preset for you. If you need to choose a different code, we have provided a detailed lesson here, which tells you what to select in which situation and how to edit the manifest.

Other Fixes and Enhancements

In addition, for 9.6.12 rc-1 the following issues have been addressed:

• Pressing Ctrl+C while a server engine is running in terminal will now cause it to immediately terminate
• Grouped option button menus can now be scrolled using the mouse wheel or trackpad.
• RevDB will no longer cause a crash on 64-bit engines when connecting to an oracle database
• The driverNames() function no longer returns empty on recent macOS versions
• The drawer, pulldown, popup and option commands will no longer crash when targeting a field
• Opening a stack as pulldown, popup or option on server or headless standalones will no longer cause a crash
• Setting the rect of a stack with its fullscreen property set to true on server or headless standalones will no longer cause a crash
• The server engine will now return an exit code of 255 if an error occurs while attempting to run the provided script
• The reset paint command will no longer throw an error if the default pattern images cannot be found
• Building standalones which have a lot of files to include on macOS is now substantially faster
• The kill command now works as expected when given a signal name rather than number on macOS
• Writing to stdout, stderr or a process is no longer buffered on Linux, ensuring that receiving processes can respond to output immediately
• Using the show cards command to show less than one card will no longer cause a crash
• A (keyed) protected stack which has had an object script set to empty will now save correctly
• The nfcTagReceived message is now sent when reading an NFC tag on Android
• Using the import snapshot command on an object will now correctly render text when used in the server and standalone (in no ui mode) engines on Windows
• The browser widget on Windows and Linux will no longer become unstable when used extensively
• The scrollbar will no longer cause a crash when the pageIncrement or lineIncrement property is set to a negative value
• A default privacy manifest is now included in the app bundle when building an iOS standalone if one hasn’t been specified in the Copy Files pane

LiveCode 10 dp-8

In addition to the above, LiveCode 10 dp-8 has the following specific fixes:

• The precedence of the logical ‘or’ operator has been changed back to be lower than logical ‘and’
• The drawer command (and mode) now has the same effect as the palette command (and mode). Since the drawer window mode has not been supported since the underlying OS switched to using Cocoa this change brings MacOS in line with other desktop platforms.
• The ‘start using’ command will now check that a stack’s script compiles when the stack is referred to by ‘stack <name>’
• The ‘do as javascript’ syntax on Web now returns more detailed error information
• The browser widget on Web will no longer cause a crash when the javascriptHandlers property is used extensively

You can download these releases from your LiveCode account. To locate a test release, please follow the steps in this lesson. Not got an account yet? Sign up for a trial here.