The Top 7 Changes in LiveCode 8.0 DP 3

Want to know what’s new in LiveCode 8.0 since DP 2?

Want to get your hands on LiveCode 8.0 DP 3? 

Here’s a quick summary of the Top 7 Changes – and a lot has changed! Fasten your seatbelts!

1. New and Improved Property Editors

Many of the property inspector editors have been improved for this release. The most significant change is the ability to pop up another stack to edit sub-properties of a given property.

We have used this to implement the graphic effects editors:

We have also added a color swatch widget and a gradient editor widget. We’ve combined the gradient editor widget with popup editors to create the gradient fill editor:

You’ll notice that numeric properties now have increment twiddles and sliders as appropriate.

Properties declared as ‘script’ type carry a reference to an object and have a button which takes you to the script of the target object.

We’ve also revamped the property editors for the widgets that are packaged with LiveCode, so now it couldn’t be easier to set up the basic UI for an iOS app:

2. Menubar

The menubar has been made a script-only stack to facilitate bugfixes and community contributions. You shouldn’t notice much difference in terms of its appearance, but some of the menu items have been changed.

The ‘New Mainstack’ item now has a submenu with a range of size choices, as well as the option to create a script-only stack. Selecting script-only stack will prompt a choice of name and it will subsequently open the stack in the script editor.

The Object > New Control submenu is now generated based on the property information present for each object type and the newly added Object > New Widget submenu is generated based on the currently loaded widget extensions.

We have also centralised the building and handling of contextual menus in the menubar script. This makes per-object contextual menus display and behave consistently throughout the IDE.

3. Widget Metadata and the IDE

Widget metadata now controls a number of additional features with respect to how the widget interacts with the IDE. Firstly, the preferred size attribute controls the initial size of the widget when dragged out from the tools palette.

For example, the navbar widget now has

metadata preferredSize is “320,49”

so that when dragged out, it is created at the correct size for an original iPhone screen.

Secondly, the user-visible attribute controls whether the widget appears at all in the tools palette of the IDE. A number of widgets have been declared user invisible for this release, either because they are not meant to be draggable objects at all (e.g. the icon picker widget, which is designed to be popped up) or they are not quite refined to the point where they are suitable for user stacks. However, they are included because they are being used in the IDE (for example the tree view widget).

Finally, if present, the svgicon attribute will be used to display an icon for the widget in the tools palette, taking precedence over the included icon resources. All of the widgets included by default in the tools palette now use svg icon paths:

4. Standalone Settings

A field has been added to the Copy Files tab of the standalone settings, which is populated with the list of currently installed extensions. All selected extensions from this list are included in standalones and loaded when the standalone is launched. ‘Use’ dependencies are automatically calculated and included along with the top-level widget.

5. Composed Widgets

Widgets can now either be ‘host’ widgets, created when a widget is directly embedded in a stack, or ‘child’ widgets, which are created when a widget is used as a child widget within another widget.

In our GitHub repo, there is an example of a widget which composes the clock widget and the selector widget to create a version of the clock widget with an adjustable time zone:

.

The label at the top of the widget reflects which portion of the widget the mouse is over.

Here is a snippet of the code which shows how the Widget type is used to manipulate child widgets:

widget com.livecode.extensions.example.simplecomposed

use com.livecode.canvas
use com.livecode.widget

metadata title is "Simple Composed Widget"
metadata author is "LiveCode"
metadata version is "1.0.0"

private variable mInsideChild as String
private variable mInside as Boolean

private variable mSelector as Widget
private variable mClock as Widget

public handler OnCreate()
 put false into mInside
 put the empty string into mInsideChild

 put a new widget "com.livecode.extensions.livecode.selector" into mSelector
 set property "numSelections" of mSelector to 6
 set annotation "Name" of mSelector to "Selector"

 put a new widget "com.livecode.extensions.livecode.clock" into mClock
 set annotation "Name" of mClock to "Clock"

 place mSelector
 place mClock
end handler

In the OnCreate handler, the widget objects are created, stored in the private variables and ‘placed.’ Child widgets can be stored as variables and manipulated without actually being drawn to a canvas if they are unplaced.

Placing a widget ensures that they are drawn in placement order. Setting an annotation of a child widget assigns it a tag so that when an unknown child widget is returned by an operator, its annotation can be used to identify it.

For more information on composed widgets, please consult the release notes and the “Extending LiveCode” guide available in the dictionary.

6. Community contribution

Since going Open Source we have received quite a few contributions to the engine and IDE. We are really pleased to be able to include two community contributions to widgets in 8.0 DP 3, namely macMikey‘s adjustment of the hour hand position in the clock widget, and Trevor DeVore‘s positioning and scaling code for the SVG icon widget.

We have also had a community contributed documentation bug fix from Mark Davis.

Thanks everyone!

7. Bugfixes galore

There are bug fixes. Lots of them. Perhaps a few hundred, including those rolled up from earlier versions. So please do help us out if you can by testing this developer preview!

Known Issues:

iOS device builds are currently broken. However, it is still possible to test iOS apps in the simulator.

revBrowser fails to initialise in the 32-bit Linux engine. This causes the dictionary to fail to render.

The next DP of LiveCode 8.0 will be released shortly!

Please report any bugs encountered on our Bugzilla.

LiveCode 8.0 DP 3 is available to download from our downloads page.

You can read the LiveCode 8.0 DP 3 release notes here:

http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/8_0_0/LiveCodeNotes-8_0_0_dp_3.pdf.

Are you excited about LiveCode 8.0 DP 3? Do you have questions, comments, thoughts, or ideas? Please share in the comments below!