[ANN] Release 9.0.0 DP-9

[panagiotis merakos]

Dear list members,

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.0.0 DP-9.


Developer Preview Release
=========================
Warning: this is not a stable release.  Please ensure that you back up your
stacks before testing them.

Getting the Release
===================
You can get the release at https://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/ or via
the automatic updater.

Release Contents
================
LiveCode 9.0.0 DP-9 comes with 56 bugfixes. Moreover, more than 90 bugfixes
that were fixed in LiveCode 8.1.x and 8.2.x, are now merged into LiveCode
9.0.0 DP-9.

In addition, LiveCode 9.0.0 DP-9 includes a lot of amazing new features:

- A liburl driver has been added that implements the liburl handlers for
http(s) urls. The driver calls javascript functions (via do as javascript)
to create xml http requests for each url fetched by liburl

- Natural integer types NaturalSInt and NaturalUInt have been added to the
foreign module. These map to 32-bit or 64-bit integers, depending on the
bitness of the processor.

- A natural float type NaturalFloat has been added to the foreign module.
This maps to float on 32-bit processors and double on 64-bit processors.

- Thread affinity for iOS: the idea of “thread affinity” introduced to Java
FFI for Android, is generalized to cover Obj-C and C foreign handlers as
well.

- A "horizontal" property has been added to the segmented control widget
which controls the orientation of the segments.


And of course, the autocomplete feature in the script editor, originally
implemented in LiveCode 8.2.0 DP-1, has been included (and improved with
additional Preferences) in LiveCode 9.0 DP-9, too.


New script libraries:

- A new Audio Recording library for Android has been added.

New experimental features:

- [Experimental] A new "Mac Native Field" widget is added to LiveCode's
widget collection. This was the result of the implementation of Objective-C
FFI (Foreign Function Interface) in LCB.
- [Experimental] A new "iOS Native Button" widget is added to LiveCode's
widget collection.


In this context, "experimental" means that these features will continue to
be developed and supported. However, how they are used in script may change
during the development cycle of 9, before it gets to final release.


Known issues
================
- The Browser widget can cause hang in the IDE in some Linux distros - see
http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19658
- The Android Native Button widget uses "labelColor", not
"foregound"/"textColor" to set the text color
- You might not be able to run HTML5 standalones locally using the most
recent version of Safari or Chrome (Firefox is OK). This is due to those
browsers now prohibiting cross-origin-requests. To test out standalones
locally using these browser, we suggest using a local HTTP server as
described in the HTML5 deployment guide.

The full release notes are available from:

http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/9_0_0/LiveCodeNotes-9_0_0_dp_9.pdf

Feedback
========
Please report any bugs encountered on our BugZilla at
http://quality.livecode.com/

We have a forum available for discussing LiveCode Builder at
http://forums.livecode.com/viewforum.php?f=93

Have fun!

The LiveCode Team
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