[ANN] Release LiveCode 9.6.10 STABLE

[LiveCode_Panos]

Dear LiveCoders,

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.6.10 STABLE.

LiveCode 9.6.10 STABLE comes with more than 20 bugfixes, including support for Android API 33, which will be a requirement for submitting new apps to the Google Play Store as of the 31st of August.

You can find more details on the bug fixes and improvements of this new release here:

https://livecode.com/livecode-9-6-10-stable-released/

You can find the release in your LiveCode account area or get it via the automatic updater.

Enjoy!

Kind regards
The LiveCode Team

[stam]

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.6.10 STABLE.

Dear Panos,
can you confirm if either 9.6.10 or 10 DP6 officially work with MacOS Sonoma please?

As you probably know this is now out of beta and available. However compatibility is not mentioned in either of the new-style blog post release notes. Can you confirm? If yes, any known issues with Sonoma?

Many thanks in advance,
Stam

[paul@researchware.com]

I'd also like to hear about LC 9.6.10 (and 9.6.9) vompatability with Sonoma. Anyone find any issues. A search of Bugzilla shows https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=24345

Does anyone know if this impacts LC 9.6.9 as well? I do not have a Sonoma machine to test on currently.

[LiveCode_Panos]

Dear Paul,

Given that MacOS Sonoma was released *after* LC 9.6.10 and 10.0.0 DP-6, I am not sure what *official* support means in this context.

However, we did test with some beta versions of MacOS Sonoma before this, and fixed some issues in LC 9.6.9 and 9.6.10.

So currently the only *known* issue is the bug report you posted - which affects both 9.6.9 and 9.6.10 (and 10.0.0 DP-6) on MacOS Sonoma, but it will be fixed in the upcoming LC releases.

Kind regards,
Panos
--

[paul@researchware.com]

Thank you Panos. It is sometime hard for my tiny company to keep up with Apple's changed. Just knowing what seems to work and what to watch for is very helpful. Our current app is built on LC 9.6.9. With the dates being the only issue (and we don't do much with dates), we'll just wait for 9.6.11 to build a new release on.

[FourthWorld]

It is sometime hard for my tiny company to keep up with Apple's changed.

Very, which begs the question: what exactly does Apple need to keep changing in their OS architecture which breeds so much instability?

[paul@researchware.com]

A long time ago (the 1990's) I used to visit Apple in Cupertino almost annually. I worked at Boston College at the time, which was a founding member of the Apple University Consortium (AUC) and Apple hosted an annual convention for AUC schools. We'd often visit Apple corporate before the convention to discuss deals and projects as you do in such instances. Visits often included non-disclosure tours of things Apple was working on.

While Apple of the 1990 most certainly had a collection of very, very brilliant people, it was also true that some of those people had huge egos and were out of touch with the majority fo real Apple customers.

To the point of "what exactly does Apple need to keep changing in their OS architecture which breeds so much instability", it was also evident from these behind the scenes trips that Apple often changed things, disruptively, because one of these folks thought that THIS specific technical approach or architecture or library was "better" and they got their way. Now that was way back in the 1990's, but I suspect there is still apart of that culture present.

No desire to start an Apple flame war with any Apple fans, but just one person's observations from a long time ago.

[RogGuay]

Repeating what I just reported on the List, LC Versions 9.6.3, 9.6.9, and 10.0.0 all give me the “LiveCode quit unexpectedly" on launch after upgrading to Sonoma v14.0 on my Mac, And no, Reopen does not work either. I subsequently downloaded 9.6.10 and indeed it does work in Sonoma. My question now is what's next? Does this mean all the older versions of LC are dead including the community versions? If so, that's a real bummer!

Roger

[stam]

Sadly that does seem to be the implication of disavowing opensource - I can’t see LC updating 9.6.3 to make it compatible with Sonoma, so yes bummer indeed.

OTOH, this only really affects users who have machines eligible for upgrade to Sonoma, and arguably if one can afford a relatively recent Mac and if LC is important to them, they could lay out £10/month for the starter edition at least (controversial, I know…).

Of course ideally this would be freely available but it doesn’t seem like that is compatible with a financially happy life for LC.ltd…

Or perhaps the existing opensource attempt at keeping 9.6.3 going might be able to offer an alternative…

[paul@researchware.com]

Repeating what I just reported on the List, LC Versions 9.6.3, 9.6.9, and 10.0.0 all give me the “LiveCode quit unexpectedly" on launch after upgrading to Sonoma v14.0 on my Mac, And no, Reopen does not work either. I subsequently downloaded 9.6.10 and indeed it does work in Sonoma. My question now is what's next? Does this mean all the older versions of LC are dead including the community versions? If so, that's a real bummer!

Roger

This seems contradictory to Panos's statement above in this topic thread that the only "known" issue is the date format bug (see link to Quality Center Report in that post). To clarify, this is the IDE that is unexpectedly quiting, when you open just the IDE (and not by double clicking or drag dropping some stack)?

Do you have any 3rd party plug-ins added to the IDE? i.e stuff in your My LiveCode folderin your Documents folder? If so, have you tried temporarily renaming your My Livecode folder and then launching just the IDE?

[richmond62]

Personally I would read:

the only "known" issue is the date format bug

as a very, very subtle way of saying:

"The Open Source Mac 'hangers on' have had their chips,and it is time to pony up."

After all, having dumped Open Source, LiveCode are ONLY going to care about things like 'the date format bug', and
NOT about the fact that people who are 'stuck' using LC 9.6.3 'Community' are frankly shafted with the advent of MacOS 14, Sonoma.

LiveCode have made it crystal clear that they are offering NO support for any of the LC Open Source versions from September 2021,
so it is a bit disingenuous to expect anything at all.

HOWEVER: for the benefit of types like me [i.e. Open Source hangers on] I should like to point out 2 things:

1. Standalones built for Mac on pre-Sonoma versions of MacOS RUN on MacOS 14, Sonoma.

2. WINE 8.1 copes very well indeed with LC 9.6.3 Windows on MacOS 14, Sonoma.

[richmond62]

does Apple need to keep changing in their OS architecture which breeds so much instability?

I don't think Apple need to, but they choose to.

Apple have got themselves into a slightly daft situation where they, and their more pea-brained customers, expect to release a new version of their OS every year.

They might be far better to sort out some of the 'blips' in, let's say, MacOS 10.9.

This has, of course, resulted in many companies going hell-for-leather towards some finishing line that keeps retreating, instead of polishing what they have got.

The fact that this is daft can be seen in that they have just released updates for MacOS 11. 12 & 13.

I still use Appleworks 6 for most of my word-processing: to do this I hang onto a G5 iMac!

[paul@researchware.com]

1. Standalones built for Mac on pre-Sonoma versions of MacOS RUN on MacOS 14, Sonoma.

Thank you for confirming.

[stam]

Repeating what I just reported on the List, LC Versions 9.6.3, 9.6.9, and 10.0.0 all give me the “LiveCode quit unexpectedly" on launch after upgrading to Sonoma v14.0 on my Mac, And no, Reopen does not work either. I subsequently downloaded 9.6.10 and indeed it does work in Sonoma. My question now is what's next? Does this mean all the older versions of LC are dead including the community versions? If so, that's a real bummer!

Roger

This seems contradictory to Panos's statement above in this topic thread that the only "known" issue is the date format bug (see link to Quality Center Report in that post). To clarify, this is the IDE that is unexpectedly quiting, when you open just the IDE (and not by double clicking or drag dropping some stack)?

Not quite correct - Panos stated that 9.6.10 and v10 DP6 work on Sonoma and so far the only issue identified is the date format bug (and that this has already been addressed in internal pre-release builds). Earlier versions never have and likely never will work with Sonoma as I understand it (not that they can't be updated, but that LC will not expend resources for this, unless I've misunderstood).

While I will upgrade to Sonoma, I'll defer this until newer versions of LC are out and the bugs fixed.


==============================================================
As to the parallel discussion going on here - pontificating on Apple's strategy: is it really just a whimsy do you think?
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.

Obviously Apple have opted for (1). We don't know remotely what the issue is, and neither do we know what the longer term strategy for Apple (or any OS vendor) is and making assumptions is daft and doesn't help anyone. I can't say I blame them if they are pursuing their long term strategy and don't want to hamstring themselves.

If you want to get annoyed at an OS vendor for stupidity and disrespect for their users, how about Microsoft, who now demand a really expensive 'security certificate' hiking up prices to 3-5 fold, essentially killing all freeware as very few freeware vendors will be able to afford the new price-hiked OV and EV certificates (that apparently need to be delivered on hardware).

If you want to pony up for the cheapest option of the OV certificate (and not pay for the racket that is the EV certificate where you can pay more to effectively buy 'reputation'), the cheapest price you'll find is $313/year (or $219/year if you buy 3 years in one go), whereas Apple has stuck with the $99/year pricing and you get a whole lot more than a silly certificate. That's put a spanner in the works for me and as others' certificates begin to expire, more will be in the same boat. Windows freeware developers will all be distributing unsigned software which is to everyone's disadvantage. Great plan Microsoft!

Just to offer some balance to some of the comments above...

[Klaus]

...
If you want to pony up for the cheapest option of the OV certificate (and not pay for the racket that is the EV certificate where you can pay more to effectively buy 'reputation'), the cheapest price you'll find is $313/year (or $219/year if you buy 3 years in one go), whereas Apple has stuck with the $99/year pricing and you get a whole lot more than a silly certificate. That's put a spanner in the works for me and as others' certificates begin to expire, more will be in the same boat. Windows freeware developers will all be distributing unsigned software which is to everyone's disadvantage. Great plan Microsoft!...

Yep, I develop freeware for Mac and Win and definitively cannot afford these new prices.
I can't even afford a decent Mac Mini with an M1 of M2 processor.
Last year (or was it already two years ago?) one could get a Win certificate for 99,- per year.

And although I paid for the Apple Dev account, I will surely NOT jump through all these hoops just to
distribute my apps OUTSIDE of the Apple App Store.The PDF of that LC lessons contains 28 pages!
https://lessons.livecode.com/m/4071/l/1 ... e-10-to-12

All this is a heavy kick into the face, thank your software giants!