LC MISTAKES

[Colin Holgate]

HyperCard's way of doing background was often a problem. You might want to have a set of things in the interface appear on every card, but much of the rest of the background be different. That meant making a new background for every variation, instead of having a "super background" that had most elements, then "sub-backgrounds" to show the background elements that were not common to the entire stack.

The LiveCode background groups can either act like a single HyperCard background, or as a set of overlapping backgrounds. Once you get the hang of them they are more flexible than the HyperCard backgrounds.

That aside, there is other "background" things for you to know about:

Mike Markkula, who Steve Wozniak credits as being the person who enabled Apple to come into existence, is one of the backers of RunRev. His pockets are probably deeper than Steve's. That doesn't mean it's so much money that they can make LiveCode be free. But the open source Kickstarter project will take them to the place you'd like them to be.

At the time that Steve Jobs said that you can only make iOS apps using Apple's Xcode, RunRev tried to sway them by committing solely to iOS, and to not do publishing to Android at all. That wasn't enough, Apple still said that you can't use Rev to make iOS apps. Fortunately that all changed back later on.

So, I don't think Apple would go for the idea of having a killer development tool included with each Mac anymore. Again, with the Kickstarter initiative it won't matter, everyone on Mac, Windows , or Linux, will be able to use LiveCode for free.