Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Mark Waddingham]

> The widgets are kind of nice, but I don't see them as a tool to allow
> me to theme my app. I see them as a tool that eventually allows me
> talk to the API of the OS.

They are a great deal more than that. Whilst LCB will have high-level 
foreign code access abilities (at the moment it is still quite 
nuts-and-bolts'), it as much about that (if not more so) a way to allow 
to write code which works in the same 'encapsulated' way engine code 
does and do so in way that ensures (in the medium term at least) will 
have much better performance than equivalent code written in LCS.

[ Performance here is actually two separate facets:

     1) compound controls as currently written in LCS are hugely 
in-efficient for particular kinds which are written often, the overhead 
of a myriad of controls cannot be mitigated regardless of how efficient 
execution of script is.

     2) the actual execution speed of the code, by being more particular 
LCB will be compilable to a more efficient execution model more easily 
and more widely. ]

> I expected to have a way to apply themes to windows, buttons, fields
> (scroll bars) and other controls. I didn't expect to have to learn
> another language to do this. I thought this would be a step towards
> native themes on iOS and Android and compatibility with themes on
> Linux. Did I misunderstand this completely ?

You won't.

We are building a themeing library in LCB which widgets will be able to 
use. So the goal is that a widget which has been written to use the 
library to draw itself will be switchable between any theme which 
supports the parts the widget requires.

i.e. If you aren't writing widgets then we want to make sure widgets 
theme appropriately, and if you are writing widgets then you can make 
theme theme easily and in a consistent way.

> Even if I misunderstood what the feature entails, will we still have
> the pluggable themes as promised within a reasonable time frame, say 3
> months? (Reasonable, since all goals should have been reached some
> time ago by now).

Forgive me if I do not comment on timescale, but what I can say is that 
getting themeing working in the initial set of widgets is very high 
priority.

Unfortunately this is one project we had to suspend temporarily in order 
to sort out our build system for the product itself (we've been putting 
this off for a while to pour all our energies into direct product 
development but it got to the point we could no longer) which is why 
there's been no sign of it just yet, however, work will resume on it 
shortly.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps