What’s Up? Release of LiveCode x.x.6 RC 1

What Happened?

The bug process has changed. What was once solely LiveCode Team territory has been taken over by LiveCode Community enthusiasts. Yes, the LiveCode Community can fix bugs, too.

What Does This Mean?

You – yes you – can fix bugs to your heart’s content! Or you can nag your LiveCode friends to fix bugs. We’ll just call you the Exterminators!

How Does This Affect You?

It empowers you and gives you direct influence. It also frees up the LiveCode Team to work on other features.

This is big. Here are the rest of the details:

Maintenance changes

Both the LiveCode 6.7 and LiveCode 7.0 series have undergone maintenance in the .6 build, which was released today and can be downloaded here.

We have changed part of our policy regarding the way fixes will be merged into the engine. In order to keep the stability as high as possible, new bug fixes will only be introduced in the first RC (Release Candidate) version. The following RCs won’t get patches for anything except fixes for regressions introduced in that first RC. After a 2 to 3 week span and the possible release of new RCs to fix regressions, the stable, fixed maintenance version will be released (here, 6.7.6 and 7.0.6).

The complete list of bug fixed in the LiveCode 6.7.6 RC 1 and 7.0.6 RC 1 is available from our download page

http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/7_0_6/LiveCodeNotes-7_0_6_rc_1.pdf

http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/7_0_6/LiveCodeNotes-6_7_6_rc_1.pdf

or from the IDE menu (Help > Release Notes).

Community Fixes

For the first time, we have included contributions from members of the community.

Bug 15378: Mobile datagrid coding interferes with mobile scrollers and Bug 15240: FIX: datagrid mobile handle multiple select line came from Mike Kerner’s suggestions.

Bug 9820:$_POST does not work if anything follows “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” in content-type came from Lyn Teyla’s suggestion.

Thank you to both Mike and Lyn for strengthening the LiveCode system!

With that in mind, we are enthusiastically welcoming bug fixes for the IDE or the engine from any member of the community. For the C++ engine file, or the LiveCode Script files in the IDE, it is now really simple for us to merge a pull request directly. Just register the bug on the GitHub repository. It is a bit different for any LiveCode stack binary (or if you don’t use GitHub). In that case, the only thing we can accept as a bug fix at the moment would be for you to file a bug report starting with “FIX” and then the description of the lines to change (in the way Mike and Lyn made theirs).

Find out more about contributing bug fixes here.

Features

In addition to bug fixes, we have added a new feature for the audiovisual players in Windows that will allow the use of QuicktTime players and non-QuickTime players at the same time, which was previously impossible.

It is now possible to set the dontUseQT property for a player object. On Windows, the default value of the dontUseQt (global) property is false. This means that any player object created will use the QuickTime API for multimedia playback. With this new feature, you can set the dontUseQT property of a player to true, without changing the value of the global dontUseQt property. In that way you can have both QuickTime and non-QuickTime players playing at the same time.

You can also find details of this in the updated dictionary entry for dontUseQt.

The left player is a QuickTime player and the right is not

6.7.6 and 7.0.6 RC Cycle

Because the introduction of bug fixes in the engine can sometimes affect core functionalities, you might experience a few unexpected changes that neither manual testing nor the automatic test system can pick up. Should you stumble upon a regression, you are more than welcome to file it on BugZilla.

Please don’t hesitate to leave comments with your opinions on how we manage bugs: the more we know about what the community likes or doesn’t like, the better the product can meet the community’s needs!