We need your help: 6.7 and 7.0 Final DP’s released

by Ben Beaumont on July 22, 2014 14 comments

After months of hard work both from the LiveCode team and the community in testing we’re nearing the release candidate cycle for both 6.7 and 7.0. Today we release the final DP or “developer preview” of 6.7 and 7.0 containing more than 180 fixes.

LiveCode 6.7 contains many new features and refinements to the high DPI support:

  • Cocoa – Latest Mac OS API’s making your apps a 1st class citizen on that platform
  • coreText – Faster rendering of text on Mac OS
  • webKit browser – Improved desktop web browser with two way Javascript communication
  • Extended in-app purchasing – Support for Samsung and Kindle stores
  • AVFoundation – New multimedia playback on Mac enabling appStore submission
  • Effective points of graphics – A great community contribution from Mark Wieder
  • Nine-way stretch for images – Making fluid layout skinned applications even easier
  • 126 bug fixes

LiveCode 7.0 contains a completely restructured engine and will be the foundation of everything we do in 2014/2015

  • Transparent Unicode support – Create apps in any language.
  • New chunk expressions – Paragraph, sentence, trueword, codeunit, codepoint 
  • Engine refactor – New modern internals making development easier and external contributions simpler
  • Linux GDK port – This is similar to the Cocoa port for Mac. Linux users will now enjoy better platform features
  • 181 bug fixes

Developer previews / release candidates?

A developer preview (or “DP”) is a build of LiveCode that contains new features that we would like to offer to the community for testing and feedback.

A release candidate (or “RC”) is a build of LiveCode that contains new features that we propose are ready for release. During the release cycle the team focuses on testing, refinement and bug fixes. Bugs found are fixed and a new release candidate is built. Multiple RC’s are released until the build is deemed stable.

A stable release (or “GM”, short for “Golden Master”) is a build of LiveCode that is feature complete and at the time of release bug free. 

How can you help?

We invite you to download and test your projects in both of these releases. 

Testing is easy. Simply open your projects in LiveCode 6.7 and 7.0 and run through your normal testing procedure. You may have written automated tests for your product or work methodically through your app, testing each of its features. Either way, doing this will reveal any changes to the behaviour of LiveCode. Our aim when redeveloping both 6.7 and 7.0 was to make stacks run EXACTLY as they did in previous versions of LiveCode. For the most part, we have achieved this so 99% of stacks should run unchanged. If you notice any changes in behaviour or experience any instability please file a bug report at quality.runrev.com

When will you go RC?

These are the last developer preview builds. The next builds will be release candidates which we hope to make available at the end of next week. Much will depend on feedback from you and whether we can resolve the issues reported over the weekend and through next week. We are still working on a multi-core rendering optimisation that will enable LiveCode to use all available CPU cores when rendering your stacks. It looks like it will offer some good performance improvements and will be released in the first RC builds. 

Why not merge 6.7 and 7 into 1 release?

Some of you have asked why we don’t put 6.7 and 7.0 together into a single release, especially considering they are both coming out at the same time. Our primary motivation is you, our users. Many rely on our technology in your businesses and 6.7 provides a much smaller jump in changes upon which to deliver your products. The 7.0 developments have changed the way your stacks read in and write out out to disk as well as altering the performance profile of LiveCode. Certain operations in LiveCode are now slower while others are much faster. Text manipulation is at the heart of the LiveCode engine which now stores and processes strings as Unicode which is much more complex than the previous native format. Almost every command and function in LiveCode interacts with text meaning that many now perform at different speeds than they did before. Providing a 6.7 release enables those of you who need to tweak your apps for 7.0 the time to do so. 

Where can I get these releases?

You can download installers at downloads.livecode.com or choose “check for updates” from the help menu in LiveCode.

Report it at quality.runrev.com. The better your report the more quickly our test team can reproduce and the easier it is for our developers to identify the problem in the source and fix it. A great bug report would contain:

1) A simple sample stack with a script that triggers the issue. The simpler, the better.
2) A step by step guide to causing the issue. E.g:
a) Open the attached sample stack
b) Click on the “start” button
c) RESULT: Causes LiveCode to misbehave is x,y and z ways
d) EXPECTED RESULT: LiveCode previously behaved like a,b and c

Where can I find out about the specifics in these releases?

We provide release notes with every build of LiveCode. These provide details of every feature, change and bug fix made in the release. You can find links to the release notes at downloads.livecode.com and from the help menu in LiveCode.

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Ben BeaumontWe need your help: 6.7 and 7.0 Final DP’s released

LiveCode 6.7.0 DP1 Released

by Ben Beaumont on March 28, 2014 5 comments

We are pleased to announce the preview release of LiveCode 6.7.0 DP1.

For those of you that don’t know, LiveCode releases come in different stages.

DP – developer preview (feature incomplete likely to be unstable)

RC – release candidate ( feature complete, likely to be quite stable but is not considered the final stable release)

GM – gold master ( feature complete stable release)

The primary focus of this release is cocoa support. This required us to re-port LiveCode to the newer Mac platform API’s (cocoa). As a result, there may be some instabilities on Mac OS. Once again, thanks to those who helped with alpha testing to iron out the major bugs. 6.7 has now passed all automated tests and a first pass community test. We are aware of a sporadic crash related to audio which we’ve been unable to replicate or trace. 

Release Contents

  • Cocoa Support
  • New revBrowser WebKit external (Windows, Mac) with new bi-direction javascript to LiveCode communication.
  • Mobile In-App Purchasing support extended to Amazon * and Samsung stores
  • Clipboard data ‘styledText’ array accessor
  • OS 10.5 (Leopard) Support dropped
  • 4 bug fixes: 
    • 11975 – "import snapshot from rect …" only imports part of the screen on Windows
    • 11946 – iOS 7.1 Simulator doesn’t remember device type when launching using ‘Test’
    • 11917 – Setting the label of an option or combo-box does not update the menuHistory.
    • 11808 – pixelScaling not enabled on Windows Commercial edition

* Our in-app purchasing implementation for the Amazon AppStore is unfortunately restricted to commercial license holders only. This is due to the Amazon PML license being incompatible with the GPL. If you wish to use the Amazon in-app purchasing features of LiveCode you will need to be a valid commercial licence holder.

For full details of features and fixes please see the release notes: http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/6_7_0/LiveCodeNotes-6_7_0_dp_1.pdf

Known Issues

  • We are yet to implement an AVFoundation version of the player object and switch the engine to weak link to Quicktime. This is expected for DP2.
  • Performance on High DPI system slow from 6.6 onwards. Our head of technology posted about this on our blog last week. We plan to refine his prototype and include during the 6.7 cycle. For those of you who missed the post you can read it here: http://livecode.com/blog/2014/03/18/hi-speed-hidpi/.
  • Sporadic crash related to audio (not reproducible at present).
  • Field navigation with arrow keys in WebKit browser input fields. http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12047

Testing
As always we appreciate very much all those who help us refine these early releases. 

  1. If you are a browser object user, we would appreciate you testing your projects with the new revBrowser external. You can create both old and new WebKit browser instances. Please see the release notes for details of how to create the WebKit variant. The original revBrowser object remains unchanged.
  2. If you are a mac users please test all your projects by opening them and seeing how they behave in the new windowing system. Your apps will now be rendering entirely in the cocoa windowing framework so you’ll notice subtle differences.
  3. If you have a mobile app that uses in-app purchases please see the release notes for details of the new in-app API. You will need to make some minor changes to your projects to ensure that your in-app purchases remain functional with LiveCode 6.7. The new API is cleaner and simpler as well as supporting the two additional stores and subscriptions. 

Reporting Bugs
If you encounter an issue with this release please submit a bug report to our quality centre: http://quality.runrev.com/enter_bug.cgi

Get the release
To upgrade to this release please select "check for updates" from the help menu in LiveCode or download the installers directly at: http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/

Resources
For lessons related to the new in-app purchasing api please see: http://lessons.runrev.com/m/19606

THERE ARE INSTABILITIES IN THIS PREVIEW RELEASE so please take care to use backups of your stacks when testing.

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Ben BeaumontLiveCode 6.7.0 DP1 Released