Richards talk seems to have gone down well

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Talluto wrote:

 > Would you tells us more about your presentation?  What did you
 > discuss?  How many people attended?  Give us all the gory details.
 > I saw the number jump in a big way over the weekend.  I attributed
 > it to you getting all the Linux gurus excited about LiveCode.

I'll be as brief as I can be (not easy for me <g>), since I need to 
catch up on some things now that I'm back in the office, but here goes:

UbuCon is one of several Special Events that take place at the SoCal 
Linux Expo on the Friday before the expo weekend.   We were scheduled a 
room which could accommodate about a hundred people, but were often 
spilling out into the hallway, and of course with Jono Bacon's talk on 
the exciting new Ubuntu smartphone and tablet demos we were packed 
beyond belief (UbuCon will be getting a bigger room next year).

SCaLE as a whole brought in a record crowd, nearly doubling last year's 
attendance to bring this year to 2,300.   If this were any other crowd, 
being among that many people so much smarter than me would have been 
intimidating, but this was a Linux expo, so it's more about just sharing 
knowledge in a fun environment so everyone gets smarter together. :)

While UbuCon itself is a relatively small part of SCaLE, we did have a 
lot of traffic drop in from other tracks on Friday, and having the 
LiveCode talk outlined in the schedule probably didn't hurt, as people 
who had been to UbuCon talked to their friends, and those who just 
stumbled across it in the listings on their own and were curious about it.

Monte and I corresponded before UbuCon, and agreed that spending too 
much time actually coding is less compelling for an introduction than 
simply giving a high-level overview of the tool with lots of slides 
showing examples of nice apps from the community (thanks to Ken Ray and 
Scott Rossi and others who've made screen shots available of their work 
- I was able to pull together a good mix of desktop and mobile apps on 
all platforms, using a couple of products I manage as case studies).

The only scripting I showed live was a simple "Hello World' app that 
just put text into a field, but the concept of such tight integration 
between GUI objects and the language that manipulates them is such an 
important distinction with LiveCode that I got a lot of mileage out of 
it, allowing me to introduce the messaging system and a bit of the 
object model.

And of course I built the app, for Win and Mac in addition to Linux, and 
showed them how LC builds them into folders ready to be shared.  I ran 
the Linux app of course, but then showed them the app size (about 
2.5Bs), noting that unlike Python and so many other alternatives LC apps 
are true standalones, giving a brief description of its modest system 
requirements and its unusually small number of system dependencies.

I wrapped the talk up with a discussion of the open source initiative, 
the dual-licensing, the Kickstarter, and a description of the plans 
outlined on the Kickstarter page.  When I mentioned the amount Jono 
nodded knowingly, and I noted that pretty much everyone I've talked to 
about serious code base management at this scale always seems to have 
that reaction to the cost of refactoring such a massive beast.

In discussion with the many people who came up to me to ask about 
LiveCode through the rest of the weekend, it seemed more than a few had 
become seriously curious about this strange new toy.  We'll see how it 
goes...

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys