Suggestion: Non-Appbuilding Community Edition

[Lagi Pittas]

Hi Bernard,

I could be called one of the whiners but I have paid my indy licence since
the kickstarter and the business Upgrade (until a year ago - Incase I
needed it - I didnt).

My biggest "whine" is not the ending of the open source initiative - it's
the fact that OUR biggest competitors (XOJO and B4X) have non expiring
licences and at least a non time limited "trial" version.

B4X went open source not too long ago and only charges for the IOS version
and a nice donate $10, $20, $40, $100 on each page.

No people can't be bothered to get in-touch to pay unless some itch was
just scratched - Have sent money for free stuff that I have used only once
when they got me out of a sticky situation..
I use paypal whenever I can so I don't have to get involved with entering
CVS or other "screening" make it easy and people will pay - "Don't make me
think".

Calling people parasites because they want the open source to continue (but
with better differentiation) is not constructive.

I think they should have open sourced the Linux , Windows and NOT the
mobile and only allowed sqlite in the open source versions.

You can do everything but when you want to get serious you have to pay.

If the Mobile was (of teh top of my head) priced like Xojo and the "lite"
version two without expiring so it is in livecodes interests to add value
yearly rather than fix old or regressive bugs
then people would renew yearly if there was a discount for an unbroken
subscription.

The starter system is easy (very easy)

The full lite version (windows, Mac or Linux)  with a limited binary size -
big enough for kids and schools to write useful programs but not so you
could write a full sales purchase nominal ledger
(see BBC Basic for  windows)

You could have not a nag screen but a text link in the bottom right corner
with a link to a page saying 50% discount (or whatever) for first year.

The suggestion Kevin gave that people would share stacks to run ignores the
fact that somebody wants the banana (the App/stack) and must install the
Gorilla (2G installer).

Anybody who would bother is the type who doesn't value their time so isn't
going to buy anything however cheap.

The future is the kids and the only way of capturing them is to make it
easy for them to send out a link to a program they wrote to friends and
family to show off what they did.
Make the binary big enough so that a side scroller can be written but such
that they would have to balance internal and external graphics.

A arter system does can be limited to 1 printer,  output to 1 pdf file per
session/ run / 18-20MB windows binary (at least it should be able to run
many of the programs written as games on the samples site)

But the biggest "limitation" and the best advert is the link to livecode
on the screen for a gui project and a 3 to 5 second popup for a
console type program.

The biggest error livecode has made all these years is not creating a
"working" storefront that doesn't look like it has been totally given up on.

Look at the addons created for XOJO  - and XOJO makes money on those


https://xojo.com/store/
https://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/

I still prefer livecode for a lot of reasons but I could easily jump ship
(as I have non expiring licenses for both of these ) two of which I
purchased this year - just because.

Regards lagi


On Mon, 6 Sept 2021 at 16:05, Bernard Devlin via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
KIndest Regards Lagi