[OT-ish] WWDC things of interest

[Richard Gaskin]

Mike Kerner wrote:
 >
 > I emailed Kevin and proposed another funding round, for universal
 > voice support across all platforms for all digital assistants. We
 > paid Monte to give us hooks into Dragon (for both voice in and out),
 > because Siri wasn't available.

With all due respect to you and the dev team, I hope that before we pull 
them away into new platform-specific features we first tighten up the 
loose ends with Windows.

I know that Mac represents a disproportionately large segment of our 
audience, but what we use to develop on is less important than where we 
deliver to our customers.  Many of us who use LiveCode chose it because 
SuperCard is exclusively Mac.  Even if we develop on Mac or Linux, the 
majority of most of our income comes from Windows users, and our income 
is what enables LC's income.

So it's critically important we look past direct download counts at 
livecode.com and look instead and general market share when prioritizing 
platform-specific features.

The Mac audience may be two to three times larger than Linux, but both 
are niches compared to the 86% using Windows.

The new macOS features outlined at WWDC yesterday are very exciting and 
I share your enthusiasm for seeing direct support for them in LC, 
whether as engine enhancements or as community-driven libraries using LC 
Builder's ability to call OS APIs.

But ideally any near-term development to support OS-specific features 
for Mac or Linux would be coming from the community, so the engine team 
can continue their good focus on bringing the Windows engine up to 
parity with the Mac in terms of common features and robustness.

Certainly a Feature Exchange would offset direct costs, but unless it's 
large enough to hire more devs it represents an opportunity cost.

Let's tidy up Windows right now, and if we're really itching to get 
going on Mac-specific features let's see if we can use the last 
successful fundraiser for extending LC Builder's API support to empower 
community-driven development there.

Along those lines, once that's in hand I'd love to see if anyone here 
has time and interest to explore how we might use that API access to 
handle menus in Ubuntu as they are on the Mac for better integration 
with Ubuntu Unity, but that's a different thread....


 > For those keeping score at home, I think there are now 5: Siri,
 > Google Now, Cortana, Alexa, and Dragon, serving different
 > platforms. It would therefore be great to have a way to get voice
 > recognition and voice feedback on all.

There's also Mycroft AI, a free and open system that's been getting some 
good news coverage lately:
https://mycroft.ai/

They got seed funding from a very successful Kickstarter campaign:
<https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-an-open-source-artificial-intelligence-for>

I met the devs at the SoCal Linux Expo a few months ago. Impressive 
team, impressive project. And being open source, anyone can tailor it 
for their needs however they want.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com