Suggestion: Non-Appbuilding Community Edition

Bernard Devlin bdrunrev at gmail.com
Mon Sep 6 11:03:20 EDT 2021


On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 3:08 PM Kevin Miller via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> We have dabbled with a number of low cost /entry level offerings in the
> past. There used to be a starter kit that allowed only a certain number of
> lines of code per object. We had non-standalone building products e.g.
> DreamCard/revMedia. None of these models have worked well for a long list
> of reasons - indeed they caused huge issues for us. This problem is much
> harder to solve than you might think. Will we continue to refine our entry
> level offering? Yes definitely. Specific suggestions in this area are
> welcome, particularly directly to me rather than on here.
>

Those of us who've been around since the days of Metacard knew this. It was
precisely why I haven't chimed in with "what LC should do", because I know
they've been prepared to evaluate so many different approaches.  Many years
ago the Ambassador from Fourthworld said: "it's their company to run, I
concentrate on running my business". I tried weeks ago saying that to
whiners on the forum, but it made no difference.  Even after Kevin posted
the remarks below days ago, they are still playing CEO (as Andre so pithily
puts it).

To those who were repeatedly whining I pointed out: we don't have the data
that LC Ltd has, they know what has worked/failed, they know what marketing
has worked/failed; and they have more interest in the success of LC than
any of us customers have, so we should respect that and support them in it.

Some of the whiners won't listen to reason. I got to the point where I gave
up trying to debate these issues, for no sooner had I reasoned why some
claim they'd made was wrong and a week later they were back making the same
claim.  It is annoying to see people who've never sold so much as a piece
of fruit constantly running down the company whose products they use.

LC is a very unusual development tool, virtually in a class of its own.
Communicating this uniqueness (and why the unique properties are so
important) to novices and even very experienced developers is a challenge.
With Xojo or B4X you can say "this is a cross-platform relative of Visual
Basic", and people who've had even a little programming experience in the
past 30 years will understand what they are dealing with. These days I'd
guess that 95% of Apple users don't even know the meaning of "Hypercard" or
"Applescript".  There's simply no frame of reference.  Twenty years ago I
gave a programming colleague a copy of The Hypercard Book and the Metacard
starter kit. With book in hand she said she couldn't get her head around
Metacard and gave up (and she'd been using RAD tools for a decade).  I got
her to try Revolution a year or two later, and she still couldn't
understand it.  She ended up becoming a Filemaker developer.  I've come to
the conclusion that the only option is videos that demonstrate apps being
constructed, this might at least appeal at a superficial level. I can't
think of another way to start to indicate what the tool is like. I think
this might be worth some investment.  In fact, in a discussion recently I
cited the idea of a high quality video showing Andre's calculator example.
I think I wrote to Heather about this some weeks ago.

Regards, Bernard



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