Following the really interesting discussions on this list for two years, enjoying the verve with which those developers in Edinburgh are trying to stitch the pieces together – and I know how much dedication this requires supporting so many different platforms and aspects of the LiveCode engine – and I want to thank them and support them - I think, not being a hard-core programmer, just maybe an advanced user, just someone with ideas about possible applications, I sometimes feel a bit lost.
I enjoy the smart contributions seen here on the list, maybe it from Monte, or Peter, or Rick or whoever. So, I am not sure my contribution here would lead to another thread about LiveCode and how the "rest of us" – the non programmers – might see it. It is just my very subjective contribution as a non-programmer. Even I am thinking often, how such group of dedicated LiveCode mothership developers could receive more support, or how the business model for them would work out. Because without money nothing can be done. For example, I am paying for a Microsoft membership, for Adobe creative tools, for Google Cloud space, for a dedicated VPN to allow myself to not being detected as a Swiss user only (10 dollars per month), I am paying 5 bucks for my daily coffee in the coffee shop. Assuming 100,000 paying LiveCode customers, every one paying 10 dollars each month, it would be sufficient to get things really going and inviting many more supporters and developers to be on board. If it does not reach big numbers, what would be the future of LiveCode? It has to grow BIG. To me and my clients, the front end usability is what we see and what we want. I love LiveCode for its language and doing what I tell it to do (more or less) with simple English expressions. I question it for not providing me the necessary building blocks of an integrated framework allowing to do simple things without having to worry about the details. I do not really like its current standard visual interface, and it requires quite some work to make this interface shine and be really usable to end users. I love Filemaker as one of the tools I am using for in-house-development, but I hate its scripting language and its slow upgrade cycle, its many limitations, and for a small company it is already much too costly to distribute solutions to other users. It is not a language. It is just a nice database application development engine. What I am up to in my contribution would be the vision that LiveCode would introduce aspects of something like Filemaker. I am convinced that the majority of paying users (monthly 10 dollars) would be business people, smallest companies for 1-10 people - but they have business needs – and business almost always needs database applications. So, we are talking about database driven applications. Such apps are not made just for fun or done as a hobby, or to develop a lot of games. There is a definite business reason, abiding to platform specific usability guidelines, looking sexy, and doing what they have to do for lots of end users, non programmers, just users like you and me. And a business is ready to pay for that. Business is not paying for games. The game market is a different market, even though game-like presentations are sometimes also very useful. ( I am not against using LiveCode for game-development or anything to not be misunderstood ))). The Filemaker market is already big enough. I am sure many Filemaker users and developers would switch to LiveCode if it would provide a similar ease of development and deployment. And that means possibly using the new-born widgets technology. But today, I am still much faster in developing a small solution for a company using Filemaker compared to LiveCode. Much faster! Why not there is a field that can easily be set to display international date and time formats and automatically would default to local standards without having to script a lot and redoing the same work over and over again? Why not a field can be defined to represent whatever data it should provide and automatically check user input? Why not there are classes of fields that can be defined behaving the same using a domain-like concept? Why not there is a data grid working like a portal in Filemaker, just allowing to insert whatever we want, buttons and pictures, fields and menus? I do not have the time to work with the details of the current data grid – except for simple text input. Why should I have to script myself all the small bits and pieces? It needs too much time. And if fields are connected with an underlying database, I want to see the updates immediately. And why not there is a data input mechanism - add data, edit data, remove data, show data including filtering and sorting? That is the pattern everybody is used to. Why not there is an easy way to define a database with tables and then link database fields to tables? It could allow defining everything in the database while defining the fields including validation rules, indexes, etc.? And then allow to create links between tables combining data so that SQL would only be needed on a more deeper level? Why not there could be an automatic synchronization mechanism between a local database such as SQLite and a server database such as MySQL or MS-SQL or whatever? Do I have to all program that myself? Why not there would be a simple in-built filter and search mechanism to display data and to export/import or create output using an inbuilt Report engine? Why not there is a security framework easy to include protecting data, whether on a local machine, or distributed in a network, or kept on some server? Take the complexity away from the standard user as much as possible. Let the user focus on the application in business or private work. Above that, there is still all the space to go deeper and deeper for those who have the time and enjoy it, or must do it. And that possibility greatly ads to the user enjoyment. I would love to see such framework integrated into the engine, or very closely related to it, that does all such work and leaves me focusing on WHAT I want to achieve, and not on HOW to achieve it. And I agree, there is a difference in deployment for small screens, or big desktop monitors with various sizes and resolutions. Not everything will ever be possible using just one layout. But at least the data sources should be available everywhere, the basic logic should be there, the expected functionality should work the same everywhere. And then there is a difference in layout and what a user can do depending on the hardware he is using. I hope very much that all this will become possible with LiveCode 8 and higher. Or maybe, I am too ambitious? I would love to see the better Filemaker worked out using LiveCode. And it will find hundreds of thousands of users, and therefore developers. Because such LiveCode will be more fun, that is interesting, sexy, that is unique to each company. Changes to a data model should be easy, deployment to many users should just be a push-button operation. LiveCode applications must also visually look like a very modern state-of-the-art piece of solid work, really supporting standard usability and user interface guidelines, or allow to break standards only in case there is a definite advantage. Follow the rules unless you master the rules. Only then you can break out. I have seen so many ugly LiveCode applications – and I am even producing such ugly apps myself – that there is no wonder that nobody out there gets overly exited since there are thousands of nice looking web pages and web applications, and desktop and mobile apps... Again, I vote for paying 10 dollars a month, and supporting a very speedy growth of LiveCode to have hundreds of thousands of such paying users and customers. I am not willing to spend 100 dollars a month as I am comparing with other tools, and I am already paying lots of money which creating holes in my purse. 10 bucks everyone will easily afford for something he or she likes.The profit is in the numbers. And at least then I could also expect that documentation is reflecting the actual engine and I am not spending hours and days searching around just to find out that something is not working, or not working as expected. documentation is a field that needs a huge effort to improve. And why not there are ready-made solutions as in Filemaker that just can be tailored to individual needs providing the basis for a professional looking and behaving application? All the basic coding should be there providing a template about how to script in LiveCode. It is not enough to have a small scale app displaying something. It should serve a business purpose, a private purpose, an educational purpose. because business will pay for LiveCode development. And if the big business guys are not sold out to it yet, the small business guys will do it. There need to be hundreds and even thousands of well-looking and well-performing apps out there stamped with "Made with LiveCode". How to make developers do that? They must see the advantage. They must see the business for themselves. They do it to earn money as well! I would employ developers paying 10 bucks to LiveCode for each of them each month, and have them develop what I want to receive, and my clients want to enjoy. I would even have them contribute to the engine. And I just believe that LiveCode needs many more professional developers and people focused coding, on professional documentation and on marketing this "mothership". Why not outsource part of the work to save costs? I myself have built and managed teams of over 100 people in software development over 15 years, and it was really a joy working with intelligent people for reasonable costs. At least there could be testing team outsourced somewhere. Why not many more autistic people - often good in programming - are taking the rid? Or educated young people coming from Syria as refugees? Or lots of smart people growing up every day in Africa? Or India? Maybe it is too difficult to convince already established programmers? And a lot could be sponsored. I am not talking of small numbers of intelligent people. If LiveCode is not growing faster, fed from a naturally increasing interest and driven by the joy of doing it, shared by developers around the world who are just happily supporting it, then there is a danger that it would eventually sink down to the bottom of the sea. Embrace the world. Become attractive. There must be a "wow" effect to move people. I want to see LiveCode lifting up like the flying Dutch- (sorry) Scotsman, soon, sooner, today. Roland _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
