LiveCode Forums

Dear forum members,

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.6.0.


Getting the Release
===================
You can get the release at https://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/ or via the automatic updater.


Release Contents
================
LiveCode 9.6.0 comes with more than 120 changes since the last stable release (9.5.1) including:

New Features
- Support for Storyboard launch images and backgrounds on iOS
- Support for using the flash as a torch in the Android Barcode Scanner
- Support for building with Xcode 11.4, using the iOS 13.4 SDK
- New tsNet and mergExt builds, built with the iOS 13.4 SDK
- The mobile player control has been updated to use the AVKit framework on iOS. This fixes a lot of existing bugs, including some new issues on iOS 13+ devices.
- The mobile browser control has been updated to use the WebKit framework on iOS. This provides better performance on iOS devices.
- The "open printing to pdf ..." command can now be used to direct printing to a PDF output file on Android devices.
- New CEF build is included, which addresses rendering issues with the browser widget in some 32bit Windows devices.
- New "focusModes" and "focusMode" properties are implemented for the Android camera control.
- The ability to pass "detailed-utf8" to the files() and folders() function to preserve unicode filenames has been added.
- Support for merging activity attributes is added in the Android Manifest Merging mechanism
- New text to speech library for iOS, Android and MacOS (Indy/Business only)
- Improved text rendering on Android
- Objective-C block support in LCB
- Ability to detect dark mode on MacOS, iOS and Android
- Improvements on mobilePickPhoto on Android, including support for front camera
- Ability to highlight none of the icons in the navigation bar widget

Bug Fixes:

- Significant performance improvement when saving stacks on Windows
- Improvements in the Windows FFI in LCB
- Fixes to drag-drop on macOS and Windows
- Windows camera control now produces much higher quality output

For the full list of all fixes, updates and enhancements please see the release notes:
http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/ ... -9_6_0.pdf


Known issues
============
- The Browser widget's native layer is not shown in some Linux distros with Cinnamon window manager.
- The use of the Browser widget is not supported on Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit LTS yet.
- The mergSettings external still uses the UIWebView API on iOS, so checking "mergSettings" in the Inclusions pane will cause an AppStore rejection, since Apple no longer accepts new apps that use UIWebView.


Required Software
=================
To build iOS apps with LiveCode you must have the appropriate versions of Xcode as follows:

- macOS 10.13.4: Xcode 10.1 - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 12.1 SDK
- macOS 10.14.4: Xcode 11.3.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 13.2 SDK
- macOS 10.15.2: Xcode 11.4.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 13.4 SDK

There is a full list of working LiveCode/macOS/Xcode combinations here:
https://livecode.com/docs/9-5-0/faq/faq/

Note: Whilst we endeavour to release updated versions of LiveCode supporting the latest Xcode/iOS SDKs as quickly as possible; we strongly recommend disabling automatic update of Xcode or downloading the specific version of Xcode required directly from the Apple developer portal and installing it separately.

Important: Since the end of April 2020, Apple is only accepting new apps built using iOS13 SDKs. Updates to existing apps can be built using iOS12 SDKs until the end of June 2020. This means that, if you wish to submit new apps to the AppStore, you will have to be running at least macOS 10.14 in order to be able to install the necessary version of Xcode.


Feedback
========
Please report any bugs encountered on our quality center at http://quality.livecode.com/

We have a forum available for discussing LiveCode Builder at viewforum.php?f=93


Have fun!
The LiveCode Team

Thanks for another great release, but more than that the message box problems in Windows causing LiveCode to crawl is now much, much better with 9.6.0.... I can now use the message box without any drastic deterioration in speed, tested on 1 pc and 1 laptop

I cannot see any mention of changes that would have affected this in the release notes, so would be curious to know if any changes were made to the way memory or messages are handled were made.

How does one detect dark mode on macOS? I'm not finding anything in the Dictionary when I search for "dark" and I don't see anything in the Standalone Application Settings.

I believe there is something written about that in the releas notes

"Dark mode detection
A new systemAppearance property has been added which returns
dark if the application is running in dark mode and light otherwise."
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