What Newbies Expect

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

I do a lot of LC advocacy.  Occasionally I hook a "whale"

This is a real case:  This older man has work in the software "specification" field for 25 years. He doesn't actually code, but has written books on the whole enterprise software development process. Now a consultant for the IRS in Washington. Team leaders review their development paths with him, he does analyses and makes suggestions. he has even written books at a very abtract level on software development process.

So he also teaches youth at a local temple and has helping me sort our some things for our own software and in the process I discovered how huge his brain and talents are he mocked up a UI for me for a module in our next app in PowerPoint and I realized I had a rather advanced UX guy on my team and he just didn’t know it.   So I asked him to download Livecode and "have some fun"  which he was willing to do… instead of, like many programmers, moving from years of working in code and moving up (I have one person on my team who say she has written and taught every language known to man… but "I don't do that any more")  He is interested in, after years of working a very high abstract level… having fun in a real sand box.

So… that's the back story.

I thought his first feedback on getting started was interesing:

" I have been working through the tutorials I am on livecode properties after going through the opening tutorial and not understanding much, then stepping through from the very beginning. I can see conceptually how to glue together the prototype you requested though I believe I need to go through the rest of the basic concepts before starting. I am still trying to figure out how to get object properties to inherit from objects at a higher level as to avoid an unmaintainable mass of stuff."

After me explaining the stack/card/group hierarchy (sent font and font size in the stack and all controls follow)  he explains:

"I sort of got the hierarchy concept however, I got tripped up with details such as distinguishing the deck from the first card. Also, it seemed as though I could put a button on at the deck level and all other buttons would inherit its properties – however my experiments didn’t work as expected.  It sounds from your explanation that things should work in the way I thought but I was probably doing something wrong."

POINT: I *think* what he is expecting what we might think of a "class" where you could have many buttons be a member of a class, change the class and all the buttons change.

So, how could this be made easy for a newbie?