LiveCode 7 brings your app effortless internationalization and beautiful display across a huge range of desktops and devices. Your app will be a thing of beauty on the smallest Android device and the biggest Mac retina screen, capable of displaying everything from plain English to Arabic. You could even run it on a Rasbperry Pi. And if Linux or Server is your thing – we do that too, in glorious 64 bit.

1- International Apps With Ease

The beautiful thing about Unicode in LiveCode 7 is that you won’t notice it. You can just use it. Anywhere. Fields, objects, buttons, user input, file paths… it all just works. Right to left text, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French or hieroglyphics. LiveCode won’t bat an eyelid. 

2- Any Screen Size, Any Resolution, Anywhere.

LiveCode now has full Resolution Independence. Your app will scale to fit any screen or device, whether it is a full size Mac Retina or a tiny Android phone. You don’t need to do anything fancy to make this work, no more switching between sets of assets for different deployment options. 

3- Pixel Perfect and Stretchable

We’ve done some fundamental work on the way LiveCode 7 displays graphics. This is aimed at speeding up displays and ensuring your graphics display correctly on all screens sizes and densities. This means you have a better, simpler, coding experience, and your end users get an improved app experience, where the screen updates faster and is consistent across all platforms including Mobile.

4- A Browser For Your App

The new implementation of the CEF Browser Object means that developers can create hybrid apps that incorporate web content easily. Any app can now have an embedded browser displaying content on LiveCode supported platforms including Mobile in a consistent way.

5- 1st Class Citizen on Mac and iOS

Cocoa support means that you can now embed native objects in LiveCode windows, instead of floating them above. This means integration is smoother, better, simpler and complex implementations such as revBrowser  run a million times better. Putting it another way, your app will have the look and feel that Mac users expect with no sacrifice of features.

6- Run LiveCode Community on a $50 Device

For the first time we have a Community supported new LiveCode platform. The Raspberry Pi is great for education, use in computer science, fun for students, hobbyists old and young, and handy for home automation. LiveCode is great for all these things too… what a happy coincidence! Let’s get together…

7- Power to the Cloud

For the 7 release, LiveCode’s Linux support has received an overhaul. We’re particularly pleased that as part of this we now have a 64bit Linux/Server engine, making LiveCode Server a powerful option for cloud oriented geeks everywhere. GTK is now supported meaning Linux looks and runs better on the most popular Linux systems. Check out this short example of using graphics from LiveCode Server.

What else made it into 7?

During the major refactor and main push for LiveCode 7, some tasty extras crept into the feature list. Some of the benefits include slimmer, lighter apps if you are using large arrays, robust and secure connections and better monetizing for your app. We've also added support for iOS 8 and the latest Apple SDK's, to keep you bang up to date.

Favourite "extra" feature: Referenced Arrays.

f you have a really big array, and you want to use it in more than one place in your code, you no longer need to copy the whole thing, adding megabytes to the size of your app and causing a nasty case of bloat. Instead LiveCode will reference the existing array, keeping your app nice and slim.  

Here’s an example of how it works:

on mouseUp
   local tArray
   put "" into tArray[1][2]
   passByRef tArray[1]
   put tArray[1][2]
end mouseUp

on passByRef @rArray
   put "changed" into rArray[2]
end passByRef

 in the script of a button will result in “changed” appearing in the message box when the button is pressed. This allows you to reduce the overhead associated with passing sub-arrays to handlers, as you don’t need to copy the sub-array internally.