Where are the newbies?

[richmond62]

Snag is most Fairy Stories end with a handsome Prince riding in on his charger and saving the day.

Has no-one round here heard of 'post-modernism'?

Nowadays it's normally a transgendered person on an electric scooter who turns up and cancels everyone.

AND, as I am not handsome, a prince, or transgendered, all I can write is, "Don't shoot me, I'm only the story teller."

[Simon Knight]

A pro developer wanting all the features would have to shell out £2K/year for the privilege - so where is the incentive?

I have never been sure if there is a silent majority of Livecode users who do not use the forum or the list. Also are the success stories on the website the tip of the iceberg or are they the sum total and how did KLM come to be using an application written in Livecode ?

£2K per year for the complete package is in the territory of corporate, tax deductible, purchases and well above my budget even when I was a small business. Makes me wonder how many current forum users are paying the full ticket price.

[richmond62]

https://livecode.com/klm/

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/runrev-p ... re-9865835

KLM's developer developed their booking system with LC in or before 2013.

Whether they STILL use LiveCode, or, even if they do, whether they have paid for a new LC licence since 2013, is unclear.

Oh, and that insider.co.uk article also mentions LC's 'Open Language' . . .

It also uses the PAST TENSE when referring to Motorola, KLM, Siemens, Apple and Adobe uses of 'Runtime Revolution'.

Maybe KLM bought a single, lifetime developer licence wayback-when, and that was that.

I have stopped claiming financial support from the Hindu Monastery in Hawaii on the 'Thank You' screen of my Devawriter Pro as they no longer support me (mainly as my contact person there, Brahmanathaswami, is dead): it would be interesting to know whether KLM are still paying LiveCode anything.

The monks in Hawaii may still be using my program; but that is NOT the same as supporting me.

ALSO; if you have visited Edinburgh recently (I did in August last year, as I own a flat there), you would have quickly worked out that £2,000 would, just about, pay a week's bills for a family of 4.

[stam]

£2,000 would, just about, pay a week's bills for a family of 4.

Erm… that would suggest that just to survive said family would need a monthly take-home pay of £8000 AFTER TAX, which given the average salary in the UK seems extremely unlikely….

FYI the average salary in the UK is £34K/p.a. And that’s BEFORE tax.
Heck my wife and I, both of us senior NHS consultants, would struggle to pay £8,000 pcm, as you suggest because at these levels tax is >= 50%. So that would mean an annual salary of at least £190K. And let’s face it, if you make that much you probably are paying developers to do the work for u

Clearly this is a vast exaggeration, just not sure what the point of it is… £2K is not a trivial amount of money for ”normal” folk.

[richmond62]

£2K is not a trivial amount of money for ”normal” folk.

Well, I have never been entirely sure what that word, 'normal' means [a, slithery, subjective word if ever there was], but as the people who are renting our (very small) house in Scotland are paying £900 pcm, and that, in Bulgaria (where the cost of living is, supposedly, half what it is in Scotland), my wife and I work on the basis of £2,000 a month (that's just 2 of us) to live what I can only describe as a 'modest' lifestyle . . .

Whichever way you look at things [and your weekly bills, and my weekly bills, ultimately, don't come into the matter] £2,000 is small potatoes in terms of running a company like LiveCode.

[Klaus]

I think I can even "feel" the aftermath of the new price policy:
The german LC forum is almost dead and in this forum I see far less postings than I used to see.
And even on the LC mailinglist it is very, very silent compared to the past.

Too sad...

[stam]

Whichever way you look at things [and your weekly bills, and my weekly bills, ultimately, don't come into the matter] £2,000 is small potatoes in terms of running a company like LiveCode.

£2K/month is more understandable but you stated £2K/week, 4 times as much

[richmond62]

Yes, I did, and my comment was alcoholically fuelled.

of course, all the alcohol means that the bills ratchet up somewhat.

[Simon Knight]

I think I can even "feel" the aftermath of the new price policy:
The german LC forum is almost dead and in this forum I see far less postings than I used to see.
And even on the LC mailinglist it is very, very silent compared to the past.

Too sad...

This should be a read as a warning that action needs to be taken. Livecode exists in programming world that is full of options and as can be read in this thread alone those options are being followed. To be blunt Livecode is too expensive for the average hobbyist.

[richmond62]

I think that quite a few people have been blunt several times.

But, as usual, the management at LC seem to keep to their own counsel.

[glenn9]

As has been previously mentioned it seems that LC is unlikely to disrupt/displace the established `professional` languages and therefore time/treasure should be diverted to areas where there might be better benefit/cost ratios.

re user base
I think to increase LC`s visibility, and therefore its potential user base (& potentially income), is by `growing` new users by targeting education, especially schools.

I think for children to have an app (albeit desktop) up and running in literally minutes, I think would ignite passion for coding in quite a few children.

Re new features
At the moment I think LC is `preaching to the converted` re new features/developments etc as potential new users just wont have sight of LC`s existence for them to take advantage of the new innovations.

best coding language

I think there is always discussion on the `best` programming language that you should learn and I`m reminded of the camera analogy, ie which is the best camera? - the one that you have with you at the time you need to take a photo...

I think this holds true for coding languages, ie its the language that you can make meaningful apps in, in the least amount of time.

this certainly applied to me in my desire to learn how to code, having previously tried and failed miserably as a hobbyist to make apps using BASIC, VBA, C# and Python, until I stumbled across LC during lockdown and made it my lockdown project to learn how to code.

with the very generous and kind help of the members of this forum, in just a year of grabbing a few hours here and there, I`d managed to build several useful apps that I still use on an almost daily basis, both at work and at home.

I can`t emphasise enough what an amazing resource the forum is, without it would have either taken me much longer, or not at all, to build apps. Thank you.

desktop v mobile

I remember reading somewhere in the forum, I think it was a post from Richard G, that in an ideal world developing in mobile should be as straightforward as developing for desktop and cited the scrolling field as an example of this.

I guess this is being addressed through LC`s work on a browser IDE, but I think this should be LC`s main focus, ie making moble development as easy as desktop - just imagine how children`s eyes would light up if they could put apps on their phones, as well as their desktops, in minutes!!

cost

I stating the obvious, but its got be affordable for hobbyists, as well as commercial users

Hope of some interest.

Regards,

Glenn

[richmond62]

Well said, Glenn, but probably going to fall on deaf ears as what you have stated has been stated many times before over many years to no avail.

[FourthWorld]

re user base
I think to increase LC`s visibility, and therefore its potential user base (& potentially income), is by `growing` new users by targeting education, especially schools.

I think for children to have an app (albeit desktop) up and running in literally minutes, I think would ignite passion for coding in quite a few children.

LC does indeed fill an important cognitive gap between Scratch and Python.

The argument against edu focus is that it's a long game, since schools (at least in the States) are strapped for funds and often gravitate to low or no cost tools, so the upside doesn't happen until graduation when those who will program on their own will choose the tool they know.

The irony is that the company is now mature enough that two and a half generations of students have gone from age ten to twenty.

best coding language

I think there is always discussion on the `best` programming language that you should learn and I`m reminded of the camera analogy, ie which is the best camera? - the one that you have with you at the time you need to take a photo...

I think this holds true for coding languages, ie its the language that you can make meaningful apps in, in the least amount of time.

this certainly applied to me in my desire to learn how to code, having previously tried and failed miserably as a hobbyist to make apps using BASIC, VBA, C# and Python, until I stumbled across LC during lockdown and made it my lockdown project to learn how to code.

Any tool outside the most popular will struggle among those learning to program as a hired hand.

So wisely LC Ltd has focused on Indy devs, where the project decision makers only care about results, not the popularity of the language.

This can work as long as the value proposition for LC is unquestionably high.

On the desktop, LC's productivity advantage is nearly unmatched. That could be made unquestionable if the Standalone Builder was extended to include a wizard to guide the dev through the various stapling/signing steps needed. That is the biggest pain point, and so poorly addressed in other tools that it makes a ripe opportunity for LC to solidify its differentiation.

As for mobile...

desktop v mobile

I remember reading somewhere in the forum, I think it was a post from Richard G, that in an ideal world developing in mobile should be as straightforward as developing for desktop and cited the scrolling field as an example of this.

I guess this is being addressed through LC`s work on a browser IDE, but I think this should be LC`s main focus, ie making moble development as easy as desktop - just imagine how children`s eyes would light up if they could put apps on their phones, as well as their desktops, in minutes!!

I believe the field scrolling example is especially useful because it's already been solved - a dozen times over by every dev I know who's written a script to automatically instantiate the native scroller region over any scrolling control.

So in an afternoon that could be added to the general lib already tacked on when making a standalone.

That would be only an interim solution, of course. Long term we'd want the engine to do that rather than rely on a less efficient scripted workaround.

But at least that workaround could be in the next version, very affordably, buying time for the finished solution a bit down the road.

And by using something so obvious and easily addressed as a UX awareness exercise, no doubt other paper cuts that impede development efficiency would become more readily recognized and addressed along the way.

[stam]

While you make good points about the value of LC Richard, the reality is that when it comes to pricing, there is

• free
• reasonably priced
• cheaply priced with acceptable limitations and and friendly upgrade path
• cheaply priced but with crippling limitations that will put you off, and then there is
• price as high as we can possibly get away with, and then some

Unfortunately LC has elected to go with the latter two, which will continue to be an impediment to adoption.

In the cheaply priced but with crippling limitations that will put you off category (aka the 'Starter plan'), we have:

• The limitation of you apps stopping working with subscription lapsing
  Maybe instead of killing standalones, it would have been better show a 5-second splash screen at both start up and on quit showing a dialog box stating it was built with LiveCode and the developer has been using the Learning edition or some such.
  This would be enough to put off developers wanting pass off professional work, while simultaneously advertising LC and perhaps more of an incentive to convert to the standard plan to get rid of annoying notices clients will see.
• Incomprehensible pricing schemes
  Paying for two licences with 1 different platform each is 30% cheaper than paying for 1 licence with 2 platforms, when really one would have expected the opposite.
  Maybe a better approach would be to offer the Starter plan with just with 2 platforms as a fixed price - if needing more then that is incentive to convert to the Standard plan.

In the price as high as we can possibly get away with, and then some catogory (aka the 'Standard plan'), the equivalent of the Indy licence is now 3-4 times as expensive. As someone who doesn't code for a living (although I do code apps for work), I would find the old Indy price point acceptable (maybe even up to twice that if pushed) - but the new prices are hard to stomach.

To put it differently: How likely is it that the standalone apps will generate enough income to justify the high cost? Undoubtedly pro developers will get there, but indy developers? Not so sure - and they won't be either more importantly...

Or lets put this in the context of other subscription based professional software that people use to make a living - lets take for example Adobe Creative Cloud: to get ALL their 20+ apps the subscription is £792/year (excl VAT) - that is less than half of the ask from LC for all of their options in the standard plan.

There are some software subscriptions that are more expensive than the full LiveCode experience (£2,046 excl VAT), like CAD solutions (reportedly running up to $3,500/year), and some IDEs like QT ($3,790/year for 'pro' but also offers a free LGPL version) - but not many. And that's not including costs for LC Create, the previous advertised script compiler etc etc. Altogether the cost may well begin to approximate that of QT.

Currently, the cost for the full LiveCode enchilada is in the same order of magnitude as the most expensive single-user licence software subscriptions available today.
Let that sink in...

No matter how good the IDE gets, pricing will be a showstopper for many new/indy developers sadly... and I would have thought that indy developers are the target demographic for LC...

[dunbarx]

All.

Bill Atkinson believed mightily in HyperCard, but never thought that HyperTalk would ever be popular. He said that most users would take the "Rolodex" paradigm and make lots of cute address books. He was surprised when, right away in 1987/88, 100,000 users clamored for every minute detail of the language.

Thank heaven for Dan Winkler.

Of course, HC had the advantage of being bundled for free with the purchase of each Mac, a deal Bill, insisting on it, struck with Apple. And to be fair, that is where hundreds of thousands of those new users got their start.

My point is this. I think it is categorically true that LC is startlingly cool, easy to use and insanely powerful.

If only lots of people would try it...

LC HAS to find and entice those people, to lay out bait. The best way to do that is with some sort of free trial, however timed, or some sort of "limited" version. Or something else; I do not care. These have ask been discussed already.

I find it odd that there is only speculation about the finances of the company. What could that mean? I don't suppose that is actually good news?

Craig