[ANN] Release 10.0.0 DP-2

[Richard Gaskin]

Pi Digital wrote:

 > It’s so frustrating because I just spent the last week making my own
 > widget to make bar and pi charts. LOL! Now it feels like a futile
 > gesture with something far superior ‘just around the corner’. Your
 > teams have done a really good job of making them.
 >
 > I’ll get back to making more futile tools that will likely get
 > superseded by more of your work ;)

This problem is as old as platforms themselves. Indeed much of Apple's 
early dev-facing communications (circa Mac v1.0-4.0) centered around 
clarifying their interests and their intentions for keeping the 
third-party opportunity as wide open as practical.

Later on a form of Konfabulator was included as Widgets, a form of 
Delicious Library was included as iBooks, and the boundaries have been 
blurred forever since.

This is understandable, whether we're looking at a vendor whose platform 
is an OS or a dev tool, as it's incumbent on them to provide a strong 
sense of feature-completeness wherever practical.

When evaluating third-party opportunities, consider not only the LC 
world but also JavaScript.  Integration between any GUI toolkit and web 
views is likely only going to increase going forward.

As LC Ltd notes in their blog post, the new charts widget wraps 
chart.js, an open source package under MIT license.

Many key ingredients in LC make use of open source code, and given the 
vast-and-growing range of open source packages for JavaScript we can 
expect more using that language over time.

So next time you're thinking of an add-on for LC, also take a moment to 
see if such a thing is already available in JavaScript. If it is you 
just saved yourself the time otherwise needed to write it from scratch.

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