[ANN] Release LiveCode 9.6.10 STABLE

[stam]

Last year (or was it already two years ago?) one could get a Win certificate for 99,- per year.

Not sure it was ever 99/year - think it was more like 150/year when I last bought a certificate through the cheapest vendor (K-software).
No longer sadly. There has been a new stipulation by MS that all licences need to be distributed on hardware and the prices above don't even include the price of the dongle thingy you'll need. But prices everywhere have been hiked severely with this change - quite why MS doesn't do what Apple does and allows 3rd parties to gouge developers is unclear...

And on that note I can no longer recommend K-software at all. Plenty of lip service if you phone Mitchell in person (which you have to because if you email you will likely not survive the delay until a response arrives), but zero service in actuality. And K-software's prices are now exactly those of Sectigo whose licences he resells (they used to be about 1/3 of Sectigo's prices), so I'd just go direct to them - still a lot cheaper than other vendors. But yeah prices are as above

[FourthWorld]

There are 2 ways to update/upgrade an OS - or any app:
1. Either build stuff as you see fit and if something isn't backward compatible for 3rd parties, they need to address this, or
2. Try to maintain backward compatibility for all eternity, while trying to add the new features you want - in the best case scenario hamstringing your efforts and in the worst case ending up with bloated, insecure monstrosity. I'm sure we all know of systems that do the latter.

Please. You're one of the smartest people I know. You can spot a false dichotomy better than most. "All eternity"? Let's instead talk of real things.

I have no reason to believe that Apple is willfully harming developers .

But we can all observe that OS vendors have a wide range of attitudes expressed about the value of backwards compatibility, and that Apple has the shortest window of compatibility among the Big Three desktop OS families, and also among the two that drive mobile.

We also see that Apple is by far the most profitable. Not the one with the most customers, just the one who spends the least to make the most.

As a shareholder, I like it.

As a developer, I question it, esp. where it adversely affects my tools vendors like LC, along with my friends, colleagues, and customers.

But please note that I'm fully aware that what I have is a question, not a declaration.

If there's a sound reason why Apple is uniquely unable to make the changes they deem useful to their OS without causing unusual expense throughout their software ecosystem, I'd be happy to hear it.

But in the infinite space between doing nothing and doing everything, there's a lot of room for refinement.

No human is perfect, and companies - being comprised of imperfect humans - are equally ripe for continual improvement.

[stam]

Sure, that was perhaps stated a bit strongly.
The 'all eternity' refers specifically to older versions of Windows where backwards compatibility had been a priority for many years as they positioned themselves as business systems, but which was also famously full of security holes (I witnessed an ultrasound machine running on embedded WinXP getting infected with the Blaster worm simply by being connected to the hospital network, can't make that sh*t up) and things like 'dll hell'. In that sense it was not hyperbole but an expression of what MS used to do.

However even that is changing and backward compatibility is problematic in similar or worse way:
In my hospital we've been on Windows 10 for an about 3 years (don't ask what we were running before that). But now all machines have to run Win 10 version 21H2 specifically - or our enterprise software doesn't work (medical imaging review systems, an Electronic Health Record system that runs across several hospitals and so on - and these systems went live this year) . Forget about Windows 11, none of these will work in any way on Win 11. These are systems used by about 50K users to look after about 2M patients.

Yet no one is blaming Microsoft for these issues, but rather the enterprise software vendors.
Suddenly Apple's apparent short backwards compatibility window (specifically for LC, which I'm not sure even registers with Apple) doesn't seem so bad does it

None of us can know what the issue that led to LC crashing on startup on Sonoma was (perhaps LC can comment rather than seeking answers from Apple). But I'm willing to bet it didn't require a major re-write of the IDE since they got it working quite quickly.

I would also therefore be willing to bet that most software is unaffected by the new OS. Just because it affected the one platform we use is not a reason to bemoan Apple's backward compatibility strategy, motives, intelligence or attitude to users.

A quick look online suggests that most software (like Adobe Photoshop 2020) will work fine on Sonoma, so I suspect LC was an unfortunate outlier (can't check myself as waiting on LC to release new versions before upgrading the OS).
Searching specifically for issues with Sonoma I found this reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments ... ty_issues/
one of the comments there stated

app compatibility lists from beta releases indicates that Sonoma broke fewer existing apps than some (most?) other major versions did at those stages, so this one might be less risky to update to sooner.

So given that LC is likely one of the few outliers to the majority of software that works on Sonoma, is this even a valid discussion?

[richmond62]

It IS a valid discussion as it is in a thread about LC and NOT Adobe products.

I am currently 'in a relationship' with the GIMP people as Sonoma hoses GIMP, which, which ever way to decide to slice your haggis is 'somewhat' bigger than LC, some would even argue bigger than Photoshop as it certainly mde them drop their pricing exponentially.

Over on 'the other side', that place that General Urko [pace Planet of the Apes part deux] termed 'the forbidden zone' after the ARM question, the next one is, inevitably, the Sonoma question.

Frankly I couldn't give a toss that 'everything else works' on MacOS Snore (another slightly tedious annual 'upgrade' hyped to blazes), but I DO care that it screws LC in quite a few ways.

AND as to 'pontificating', well, some of us at least, use 'pontifications' in an attempt to stimulate debate, even if the result is a load of wet fish.

[stam]

No one twisted your arm to upgrade to Sonoma. Ventura is a fine OS - Other than stating that you’re running the latest OS, did you have another reason to upgrade?

Regardless of OS, there are always issues upgrading. MacOS is no exception, and the wiser users always wait for the “.1” update.

But that aside, I’m not sure what the expectation is here - that Apple (or whichever OS Vendor you pray to) ensures that every single app in existence works? Or perhaps they should call you to see what’s important for you?

It’s fine being an early adopter, and if that’s your thing then more power to you.
But to expect everything to work as expected out of the box every time is unrealistic, so as an early adopter, not sure why this is surprising or even a topic of a perceived debate. You might as well be debating about the weather…

If anything you should be moaning at the software vendors of the apps that don’t work for not sorting out issues during Sonoma beta. Sonoma was announced in the summer and presented at the WWDC, and has been in beta a couple of months. A lot of this likely could have been pre-empted…

[FourthWorld]

The platform boosterism is fun and all (I'm a shareholder; thanks), but do we have data on this latest MacOS issue, and/or the ongoing incompatibilities between MacOS upgrades and any earlier version of xCode needed for making iOS apps?

[richmond62]

No, no-one forced me to upgrade to Sonoma, that is my fault alone. And I shall pay for that decision on 15 October when I plan to revert that machine to Ventura.

BUT my concern is not about my decision to be a 'silly banana' and over-eagerly upgrade everything.

My concern is how one might ensure that standalones one might produce on, say, macOS 11 Big Sur would run on next year's macOS 15 'Cannery Row', as a slew of end-users might be 'silly bananas'.

[richmond62]

Another question I have is; IF a Mac standalone generated by LC 9.6.3 Community runs on MacOS 14, while the IDE does not, what is the difference between the engine that powers the IDE and the engine that powers the standalone?

[paul@researchware.com]

My concern is how one might ensure that standalones one might produce on, say, macOS 11 Big Sur would run on next year's macOS 15 'Cannery Row', as a slew of end-users might be 'silly bananas'.

Unfortnately, that is impossible. Regardless of whether you are building an app in Livecode or C++ or Java or whatever, when you build it, you can quality assurance test against every operating system you are offering it for to ensure it runs. You can not test it again some future OS.

If the OS vendor releases a future OS and maintains backwards compatibility, your app will still run. if they change something with that new OS that breaks your app, you will need to build a new version (whether using a new Livecode engine or a new C++ library or Java library or whatever) that addresses the change the OS vendor made. An app that runs fine on Windows 11 may break on Windows 12 and if it does, it can only be fixed by rebuilding it with updated development tools that work on Windows 12.

The closest one can come to ensuring that standalones produced on an older development tool will run on next years new OS is to join in trying to lobby OS manufacturer to maintain backwards compatibility. Which is hard and expensive as that means you often need to be an active beta tested of the new OS (which means havng hardware and time to beta test a new OS as it goes through its beta cycle).

[richmond62]

Lobbying Apple, Hmm, probably better to lobby Donald Trump for a B-job.

[ 'B-job' means 'Borrow the lawnmower', of course. ]

AND, one 'Richmond Mathewson' sent any number of crash-bang-wallop reports of LC 9.6.3 during all those developer betas: and all he got was some 'utter crap' about how LC worked on MacOS Monterey (which we know).