I've been playing around with LiveCode for a couple of days to see what can be done with this product and i'm amazed how easy it is to get up in speed from absolute zero knowledge about any xTalk scripting language.
I just want to share the story on how I found out about LiveCode. In my private life I like to play around with retro computer stuff as long as it is from the 8-bit era. I own a couple of C64's and like to do some assembly programming just for fun trying to get out as much as possible of the 1Mhz MOS6510.
A while ago I started to get interested in the Apple II and bought the Virtual II emulator and played around with it. Tried some assembly language programming, and started to understand the the great architecture that Woz implemented into the Apple II.
The Apple II of cause got me into the Apple IIGS. Found another great emulator called Sweet16 and started to play around with that environment. One thing leads to another and suddenly my eyes got caught on something called HyperCard that was ported from the Macintosh to the Apple II GS. I just played around with HyperCard and an hour into my session I started to play with the HyperTalk scripting language. One hour later I had made a simple calculator in HyperCard and I was amazed how good this scripting language is especially in the area of manipulating text.
Reading up on the history of HyperCard I just could not understand how Apple could kill that product. I mean we have JavaScript for the web and Ruby and Python and they are all great scripting languages. I programmed in all of them and I really love them but nothing comes close to how easy it is to use xTalk.
So, I thought to myself, "Someone out there must have understood that there has to be a future for this language" and made something more up-to-date.
And here I am a couple of weeks later. I bought a Hobbyist license of LiveCode about a week ago after trying out the trial version of both LiveCode and SuperCard and for me LiveCode was the environment i liked better.
Well, had it not been for my interest in learning more about the Apple II. I would never found LiveCode so my first real project in LiveCode is a "Apple II Lores-Graphics Simulator" called Pixels that invokes the Basic routines like Plot etc. Graphicly it shows of an old Basic lores graphics demo. I was a little bit skeptical that a card in LiveCode could handle over 1600 pixels in the form of image objects, but it can without any problems. I'ts nothing more then a useless demo but was really fun to implement in LiveCode.
Though it takes time to compile the stack as a standalone program with that many objects on a card. There probably is a much better way to simulate the lores graphics of an Apple II then using images to simulate the pixel in Livecode. But I've learned allot by doing this. Copying ImageData, handling images, skinning and how messages flows thru a LiveCode programs besides scripting. Of cause putting 1600 images to simulate the pixels of an Lores Apple II screen onto a card meant using the scripting language to do it for me
I'm a lazy programmer always trying to find a way to have "my code write code for me".This forum and the tutorials that runrev provides has been a great to search for help together with the Users Guide to solve some issues I have had during my exploration of LiveCode's scripting language. And to be able to run the code directly using a Debugger without having to compile it is just GREAT!! It saves allot of time.
My next project is to implement a simple Logo programming language in LiveCode (only the basics to start with) and I also work on a stack that involves Google Maps and locations learning more about using XML in LiveCode. Still amazed with every new discovery of LiveCode's scripting language. Next step is to look into an idea for the iPad that I have had for over a year, but never had the time to write X rows of Objective-C and really get into XCode. Again LiveCode saves me letting me focus more on what the program should do and how it should work instead of trying to learn Objective-C and Xcode. I have also bought a license of the AE engine that I yet have to get to play with.
Programming should be fun and LiveCode really is an environment that let you have fun working on your own little project. Sad that it is not better known. Especially now when besides cross-compiling for OSX,Windows and Linux you can invoke iOS and Android too.
- Pixels in LiveCode
/Ulf, Sweden
