Version 8, DP16 Tutorial Runthrough

William Prothero prothero at earthednet.org
Thu Mar 17 18:41:47 EDT 2016


Folks:
I just downloaded LC 8 DP16 and tried out the tutorial. I suspect that the authors of this would appreciate my notes as I went through the tutorial. First, off, it’s really nice and does show that Livecode can make very cool apps. Great job!

Since this is the first intro a newbie might get to Livecode, it’s really vital that the tutorial process be flawless. That’s why I’m hoping my comments below are helpful, and I do know how hard it can be, when the IDE may be a slightly moving target and there is LOTS to do.

As you can read from my notes below, I took the perspective of a new user who has never been exposed to livecode. There were a few gotchas that even had me scratching my head a bit. One very important thing when teaching newbies, is to scrupulously pay attention to how the instructions actually match what the newbie sees on the screen. There were a number of instances where I got stuck, but then got by by guessing what was meant. These are noted below.

——— My Notes ————
1. When open the property inspector for the stack, you have to click on the property inspector to get the instruction.
Careful to match instructions with actual labels on IDE. 
(e.g. “Set the Navigation names of” ? There is no listing in the property inspector named “Navigation Names”)
(e.g. Line Thickness.  you mean Line size)

2. It says in several places, to click on the “grey icon”. You mean the black icon.
Clicking the property inspector icon doesn’t always open the property inspector. Double clicking on the control does.

3. I got stuck on setting the contents property of the Label field. Whoops, figured it out.
    The “Contents” property is not listed on the property inspector. It is called “Styled Text"

4. I got to where I grouped the header and footer to make it a shared. Whoops, the property inspector opened for one of the elements of the group. I used the right hand (upper) dropdown menu on the property inspector and it looked like there was a listing for a group. I selected that. It worked! A newbie probably wouldn’t find it.

5. Setting up the chart. “Line colors”, the IDE shows “Graph Colors”

6. Setting "navigation names" doesn’t match the property inspector.

7. The tutorial refuses to advance once the “Code” button is clicked. The window opens, but the instruction pane stays where it was. Whoops, had to first click on the footer control.

8. Last card: It says “Open the property Inspector” . The dropdown menu shows “Card Inspector”

9. Setting up the navigation bar, the tutorial states to put in items as “Calculator,Chart,Services”. But, each time a new item is added, a separate box is created for the entry.

———————————————————————————————————

I hope this helps the dev team.
Best,
Bill

William Prothero, Ph.D.
University of California, Santa Barbara, Emeritus
prothero at earthednet.org







More information about the use-livecode mailing list