LiveCode 5 - Faster, Smoother, Better
What's new for you in LiveCode 5?

by Heather Nagey

If you are a part of the LiveCode community, it cannot have escaped your notice that LiveCode 5 shipped this week.

We're really excited about this release. After months of hard work, our developer team have excelled themselves. LiveCode 5 now lets you create apps with hardware accelerated graphics.This means you can now create stunning multimedia rich apps and exciting games that run faster and more smoothly than ever before on mobile platforms as well as the desktop.

The rendering speed of LiveCode 5 is up to 10x faster than its predecessor. Elsewhere in this newsletter we'll tell you more about the game we created to help us show you just how good LiveCode 5 can be. We had  lots of fun making the game so we just know you're going to love using LiveCode 5. To make it even better, animationEngine has been updated to get even more out of it for less effort, and we're giving it away free with LiveCode all of October.

Other Headline Features
Not only that, we've brought you In-App purchasing, iOS 5 compatibility, and a brand new Learning Portal. This Learning Portal is well worth a look. Elanor got such great feedback in the Academy course, that we asked her to create these six videos together with the learning materials. Below is the first one in the series, and you can check the rest out at your leisure here.

In this first lesson we take you on a tour of LiveCode and introduce basic concepts like stacks (windows), cards (screens), objects (buttons, fields etc) and how actions and information are passed between them. We'll also show you the various panes within LiveCode and what they all do.

What else is new?
If you've been reading our blog or seen our new front door you'll know all about the headline features already. What you may not appreciate yet is all the additional work that has been done, across the board, to make LiveCode 5 the best LiveCode ever. On your behalf I've been digging through the release notes for the various platforms, to see what else has been done by our hard working team.

Bug fixing
Not the sexiest topic, but as every programmer knows, one more bug squished is one less sleepless night for someone, somewhere. I've counted up 54 bugs mentioned as fixed in the release notes across desktop, iOS and Android. Here are a handful of gems:

Desktop fixes
Fixed: Building a standalone cuts off a stack
Fixed: Wrong color used to draw on Windows if new color has same red and blue when inverted as old color
... and 31 more bugs eliminated on desktop!

Android fixes
Fixed: card/stack initialized with wrong size during Android startup.
Fixed: import/export snapshot inverts colors on Android
... and 5 more specific Android bugs gone!

iOS fixes
Fixed: allowed orientations not set to plist settings on startup on iPad.
Fixed: nested controls don't receive touch messages
... and 18 more nasty little bugs squished here!

Android Love
You might be thinking - hey, great, LiveCode iOS gets in-app purchasing and support for iOS 5, but what's in it for Android? A quote from our user base answers this rather well:

"The new engine works great on Android and I can attest that it makes an amazing difference. Also, visual effects are now functional, stability and memory management has been markedly improved, redraw and background pattern issues have been addressed, orientation is better supported, graphic effects (shadows, etc) now work. These are all in parity with iOS." ~ Jacque Landman-Gay

In-App purchasing is coming very shortly to Android, it just didn't quite make the cut for 5.0. We decided to hold it back and give it a little more polish, rather than risk shipping it in a slightly experimental form.

More features
As well as the major features, LiveCode 5 brings you Pixel Perfect Intersect and the Auto-Updater on desktop. LiveCode will now inform you when there is a new release available that you might be interested in, and you can grab your update right from inside the program. Android gets support for all the standard visual effects, and even Server gets a sneaky little feature add - support for sessions has been added.

Upgrading that’s good for the pocket!
One of the most commonly asked questions I get asked is from LiveCoders who want to stay ahead with every LiveCode platform and every upgrade. Some of you just can’t get enough of us - and that’s all right by me.

All in all, its a great release. We cannot wait to start hearing about your Killer Apps that you will be able to create with it.

About the Author Heather Nagey is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd.