Livecode Future

[Jeff Reynolds]

I’ve used Livecode since the early days of MetaCard, primarily creating educational software, educational multimedia cds included with kids books and a ton of museum exhibits. For me the new create system and licensing looks pretty untenable, but I realize I’m the odd duck.

The bulk of my time on these projects was actually content design and presentation as well as interface design and functionality. Programming time in live code was a small fraction of the build costs so savings for me for a more rapid development environment is minimal and would bring in minimal, if any increased profits. I’m not churning out an app a week, these are much more robust content driven programs where dealing with the nuances of content presentation is the 800lb gorilla and requires lots of small program tweaks as that design is refined during development to get it just right. Each interface is custom and art rich so auto interface builds adds no savings, probably only hassles keeping it out of things.

Being educational also means super slim margins all around. Asking a royalty payment for just the software system licensing would be a no go with authors and publishers. If they did, they would say ok we just take that out of your end then and that would wipe out any profits for me as it would not really add anything much to my productivity.

I have no idea of how this new license would work for my exhibit programs as well. Some are presentation systems that are used by a varying number of presenters at the institutions, some employees, some volunteers (is a volunteer a seat?). On the floor the app is used by tens of thousands of visitors. I also usually write a bunch of small apps for myself, the client, and the production team to help manage content development and organization on the project as well as migrate and format the content to go into the presentation/exhibit app. These apps are used very sporadically and sometimes by a number of people, sometimes only a few. All these organizations are usually paid admission, but are non profits.

Most of my really hard core programming I doubt would be helped by the new system as that is usually controlling all sorts of devices thru different interfaces and talking to other computer systems to coordinate a show. The drivers and programming for this is usually a total dive into obscure command protocols and interfaces these devices have but are seldom used outside of with turnkey control equipment. I doubt Create is set up to do this sort of very odd programming as it’s usually a lot of fiddling and little or no decent documentation to follow and many times things are just missing or don’t work in the gear. I’ve had so many equipment features not be flushed out or broken in their code on release that due to being able to fiddle with livecode I could figure out workarounds that the manufacturers say should not work, but they do work and it’s a testament to the versatility of classic to fiddle away easily to make these workarounds. 

Cloud based or call home features built in to operate the desktop apps is also a mess in many of my client’s environments as their IT usually blocks outgoing stuff from the exhibit networks I’m on for a number of, sometimes unreasonable and unneeded, reasons. When I need it and can get access I almost always get calls 6 months later something is not working and I find a new tech has closed the door that I was given or new system upgrades blanked old settings and permissions. For this reason I just try and avoid them unless really necessary as it just usually breaks at some point and the exhibit going down is bad, bad, bad, everyone pissed at me even if not my fault.

So I have no idea of how the museum exhibits would be covered under the new licensing. I’m sure I would get a lot of pushback to get them to pay for seat subscriptions and if they did they would make me do it and again take it out of my end without any really real benefit for me and thus lower profits and paperwork hassles. Would it be a for sale situation where I only have one sale and pay a royalty on the coding portion of the contract (a lot of my contract costs are for design stuff not requiring coding)?

Fortunately for a number of reasons I’m sliding into retirement here so the last bits will be fine in classic and installed systems fine and I doubt I’ll do much if any programming in retirement now, I’ve had enough after over the last 5 decades, it’s now more fun playing with my table saw and model trains. Sad to see things go down this road, but I understand that’s where the money is for Livecode to keep in business. I just hope there is some category created for the oddballs like me to stay with create in the future if they want to. But I doubt the Create system would work to develop the multimedia rich applications I do anyway, it’s not a real app or widget (although it would probably be useful for my little utility apps, but maybe not as they tend to be odd thing and don’t need to be pretty at all, just work!) and requires a lot of odd things done in odd ways sometimes.

Jeff