LiveCode has arrived

RunRev is kind of "Hypercard" clone. Many years ago, I owned something similar for Windows, don't recall it's name -- it was very sophisticated, a very easy way to create applications, especially multimedia and educational apps.

I have been on the Runrev mail-list for a couple of years, just keeping a watch on it's progress. They have now created a GPL3 version, named LiveCode, first release today.

For further info and download:
http://runrev.com/

I have downloaded it and managed to hang it after about five minutes, while implementing the "Hello World!" tutorial.

I am noticing some rough edges. For example, at one stage, the mouse-pointer did not correlate with the highlighted entries in a pull-down menu.

The "Hello World" tutorial is poorly written, it seems to me.
One thing about it that confused me is the example script:

put "Hello World" into field 1

Although I inferred that "field 1" is the text-entry box that I had created in the window, there is no specific identification of that text-box as being "field 1".
This also confused others, who have posted comments:

http://lessons.runrev.com/s/lessons/m/2571/l/23274-hello-world

The reply to queries is that "field 1" is not definitely linked to that text-box, and is not something that you would normally do in practice. Instead, you can assign to the text-box by it's (unique) name:

put "Hello World!" into field "My Field"

Or by it's unique ID:

put "Hello World!" into field id 12345

I tested both of those last two, they work.

OK, so it might need a bit of work here and there, but it is looking pretty good.

Youtube have videos, one of which shows how to create a "Hello World" standalone executable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0-nPiXfJWI

...there is another video tutorial for "Hello World" that can be run first time that you run LiveCode, and I briefly saw the size of the standalone executable -- 6.6MB I think.

What particularly interests me about LiveCode is the multiple targets. Not just Linux, Windows and Apple desktop OS, but also iPhone and Android. Even web-app in a browser.

That means that it is ready-to-go for a touch screen, for example:
http://lessons.runrev.com/s/lessons/m/4069/l/11953-livecode-mobile-video-how-to-s-multi-touch

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Comments

LiveCode webcam app in 3 minutes
Username: BarryK
This guy creates a webcam app in 3 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwI66ag24E

LiveCode thoughts
Username: BarryK
"I save my simple Hello World, with two text-boxes and one button, as a standalone executable for Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux. In the cases of Linux and Windows, they are about 2.4MB. However, saving it just as a script (extension ".livecode"), it is only 2061 bytes -- this is the application that can be opened and run in the LiveCode development environment. Which makes me wonder if there is a "runtime" mode, so many .livecode apps can be created, each quite small, and executing one of them will run the app, without the developer windows etc.

Supercard
Username: don570
" The clone of Hypercard that ran on Mac and Windows is Supercard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCard

NeoBook
Username: BarryK
"I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the product I owned long ago was NeoBook: http://www.neosoftware.com/nbw.html

LiveCode Linux deps
Username: BarryK
"A note about Linux dependencies. A LiveCode app requires GTK libs (2.x I presume). Various database backends are supported, including SQLITE. Audio/video playing requires mplayer. All of which we have in Puppy.

LiveCode GPL
Username: BarryK
"Correction/clarification: it has been called LiveCode since 2010, but closed-source/commercial. It is LiveCode version 6.0 that is now open source GPL3.

"LiveCode Player" runtime
Username: disciple
"BarryK wrote: > However, saving it just as a script (extension ".livecode"), it is only 2061 bytes -- this is the application that can be opened and run in the LiveCode development environment. Which makes me wonder if there is a "runtime" mode, so many .livecode apps can be created, each quite small, and executing one of them will run the app, without the developer windows etc. > Wikipedia says: LiveCode projects can be deployed as standalone applications or as LiveCode Player files. LiveCode Player files utilize the LiveCode Player as an external runtime.

Re LiveCode player
Username: BarryK
"disciple, Yeah, I know what the Wikipedia says. But, I cannot find any way to actually invoke a .livecode file as run-only. Interesting, in the IDE there is a big Linux executable, about 2.4MB, and to create a standalone app, the .livecode file (either as-is or semi-compiled) plus any other needed files (such as images) are apparently just appended to that, creating a bigger executable that can then be run. Which would seem to mean that in theory at least, it should be possible to keep that big Linux executable separate. At runtime, that executable plus a runtime-file could be loaded. In other words, the 2.4MB Linux file is common to all standalone apps, so there could just be the one copy of it at runtime. This is one very interesting possibility, that, now that we have the source code, is probably do-able.

Livecode player
Username: disciple
"Oh, you're right, there are a couple of quotes around like this: > There is no such thing as a Livecode player anymore. But you can roll your own. Just make a stack that opens other stacks. And a commercial license which specifically prohibits you from making such a program, as it would allow people without the commercial license to distribute things that use it which aren't free... but the GPL version wouldn't have that clause of course.

Tags: general