AW: Why is LC text blurred on a retina display?

[Mark Waddingham]

Hi Tiemo,

On 2015-09-18 11:11, Tiemo Hollmann TB wrote:
> Thanks Kay, Neil and Mark,
> I can't use LC 7 or above, because the sort international is completely
> broken (as I have reported), what makes LC 7 or above completely 
> unusable
> for German developers. (because sorting is just such a standard 
> function...)
> But I will give 6.7.6 a try. Hoping I don't get any pitfalls with QT on
> modern systems, because I can't use AVFoundation.

I do think that 'completely broken' is perhaps not quite the correct 
phrase to use in this instance (I appreciate your native language is not 
English!).

I believe 7.0's 'sort international' functions entirely correctly - it 
just does it substantially slower than before!

I recently did some work on the sort command for LiveCode 8 to optimize 
it's performance:

https://github.com/livecode/livecode/pull/2496

The improvements were dramatic. Indeed, the new approach is actually 
much better than it was prior to 7.0 as it ensures it only computes 
certain information it needs once, and operates on a much smaller 
intermediate representation.

I asked Seb to take some timings of the stack you provided in different 
versions. Here is what he found:

6.7.7-rc-2    xSortListe    56ms  - sort full list
6.7.7-rc-2    xSortListe    27ms  - sort list items with 'a'

7.1.0-rc-3    xSortListe    596ms - sort full list
7.1.0-rc-3    xSortListe    293ms - sort list items with 'a'

8.0.0-dp-5    xSortListe    44ms  - sort full list
8.0.0-dp-5    xSortListe    26ms  - sort list items with 'a'

So, I think we can hopefully say that sort has returned to its previous 
levels of performance (and indeed, might even be faster than before 
although the margin for error in the above tests is too small to say for 
sure) :)

We'll look into back-porting this particular patch to the 7.x branch - 
the reason I put it into 8.0 was mainly because I was being 
conservative. If my changes were to break something, we'd have more time 
to sort it out on the develop branch, rather than on the 7.x maintenance 
branch.

On an unrelated note...

Can you explain why you can't use AVFoundation? Sorry to have to be the 
bearer of bad news here, but anybody who is currently dependent on 
QuickTime in any fashion is going to run into significant and insoluble 
problems as time moves forward. We have just about managed to preserve 
existing player / multimedia functionality in the Mac engine with the 
move to Cocoa (with considerably difficulty, I might add); but the 
reality is that we cannot continue to support QuickTime indefinitely as 
Apple dropped support for it, and stopped maintaining it several years 
ago. It could disappear from a new version of OS X at any point - it is 
already barred from the Mac AppStore.

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps