[ANN] Release 10.0.0 DP-1

[panagiotis merakos]

Dear list members,

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 10.0.0 DP-1.

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 find the release in your LiveCode account area or get it via the
automatic updater. To find the dp-1 test release in your LiveCode account,
please scroll down to below the list of stable releases, to find your
available test releases.


Release Contents
================
LiveCode 10.0.0 DP-1 comes with several bug fixes and some amazing new
features:

- Web deployment now uses WebAssembly

The WebAssembly engine is smaller, and substantially faster than the
previous asm.js version. In addition, moving to this new architecture means
that the wait command now works - along with any engine functionality which
internally uses wait-like functionality.

- A new "clipSnapshots" property has been added to the barcode scanner on
Android

By default, if a snapshot is taken by the Android barcode scanner widget,
the resulting image is clipped to the actual rect of the barcode. A new
property "clipSnapshots" has been added which can be set to false to
prevent this behavior, so that the resulting snapshot is the full image.

- Support for GLES3.x acceleratedRendering has been added for Android and
iOS devices

An OpenGL ES 3 implementation of the accelerated rendering backend has been
added. This makes it possible for future versions of LiveCode to leverage
the new technology to improve accelerated rendering performance. It also
enables accelerated rendering to be used with Android emulators.

- A new "bounds" option has been added to the LCB begin layer command

New syntax has been added to the Canvas library to allow specifying the
drawing boundary when beginning a new layer for an effect. This should be a
rectangle signifying the bounds of any drawing performed on the layer. This
information allows the canvas library to limit the amount of memory
allocated to the new layer by restricting the size of its backing buffer to
only that area required to correctly render effects based on the given
drawing bounds.

- A new "device transform" property has been added to the LCB canvas object

New syntax has been added to enable getting the current transform of a
canvas.
The canvas "device transform" property returns the affine transform from
logical units to backing device pixels.

- A new "is valid" operator has been added to the LCB image object

New syntax has been added to allow querying an image to determine if it
contains valid data. The image "is valid" operator returns a boolean value
indicating whether or not its data is valid.


For the full list of all fixes, updates and enhancements please see the
release notes:
http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/10_0_0/LiveCodeNotes-10_0_0_dp_1.pdf


Known issues
============
- Stacks may experience redraw issues on macOS when running on macOS 10.14
(Mojave) and macOS 10.15 (Catalina)
- The Browser widget's native layer is not shown in some Linux distros with
Cinnamon window manager.
- The use of the Browser widget is not supported on Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit LTS
yet.


Required Software
=================
To build iOS apps with LiveCode you must have the appropriate versions of
Xcode as follows:

  - macOS 10.13.4: Xcode 10.1 - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS 12.1
SDK
  - macOS 10.14.4: Xcode 11.3.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS
13.2 SDK
  - macOS 10.15.4: Xcode 12.4.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS
14.4 SDK
  - macOS 11.x   : Xcode 12.5.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS
14.5 SDK
  - macOS 12.x   : Xcode 12.5.x - LiveCode builds iOS apps using the iOS
14.5 SDK

There is a full list of working LiveCode/macOS/Xcode combinations here:
https://livecode.com/resources/support/ask-a-question/

Note: Whilst we endeavour to release updated versions of LiveCode
supporting the latest Xcode/iOS SDKs as quickly as possible; we strongly
recommend disabling automatic update of Xcode or downloading the specific
version of Xcode required directly from the Apple developer portal and
installing it separately.

Important: From the start of April 2021, Apple is only accepting apps built
using iOS14.x SDKs. This means that, if you wish to submit apps to the
AppStore you will have to be running at least macOS 10.15 in order to be
able to install the necessary version of Xcode.


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

We have a forum available for discussing LiveCode at
https://forums.livecode.com


Have fun!
The LiveCode Team
--