LiveCode has announced the next feature release in the 8.x series of LiveCode (www.livecode.com).

Faster networking and support for sFTP, TLS and SMTP makes this cross platform coding environment even more powerful on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux and Server. Multimedia support has also been reworked with a new Player object removing Quicktime dependency. The new feature list includes:

The new LiveCode Builder language which allows users to build and add their own widgets and extensions has made good progress in this release, according to LiveCode CEO Kevin Miller. Following the "Infinite LiveCode,” campaign the next iteration of LiveCode Builder will make it even easier to wrap external functionality to add it to LiveCode, he adds.

Specific improvements in the latest release mean that most variables now get initialized by default, so less boilerplate is needed, unsafe blocks and handlers can be used to flag sections of code that do dangerous things, and you can even include raw bytecode if necessary. A demo of LiveCode is available for download. Pricing starts at $699 per year.