Where does survive the inventive user ?

[Bob Sneidar]

Personally I spend a whole lot of time futzing with little things in Livecode, where I ought to be focused on creating the user interface or writing the code. I will give you an example: 

I am creating an interface with buttons that have graphic icons. In order to use the icons I have to first import the image into Livecode, note the ID, and then set the icon of the button to that property. Ok so far so good. But I ALSO want the button to look different when the user clicks. Okay, open image in an editor, modify it, save it as something else, import, wash, rinse repeat. Now I want the button to look different when disabled. Ok, blah blah yadda yadda wash rinse repeat. There are six of these I could potentially use. No complaints so far. I get it. 

Now I see that my 12 buttons are all too big! Hmmm... says I to myself, sizing the button may scale the icon too! Alas, no way. Maybe sizing the icon will work. But damn I hid the images! Okay show hidden objects, (there are 36 and they are cluttering the page) scale image, HEY the button icon scales too. Great! (wash rinse repeat 36 times). 

Save stack quit LC go have lunch come back open project DAMN! All the icons on my interface have reverted to their original size!!! Spend another hour at the laundry washing rinsing and repeating. 

Yes I know there are "ways" to do things which can minimize this impact, but the casual user/programmer is not going to know that. There are lots of examples I can give which puts unsuspecting newbies in this quandary. The reason we who remain "put up with it" is because we all know that in the long run, no matter how tedious it can get, LC is still almost infinitely easier to use to develop, debug and distribute cross platform with than C++ or Java. I learned Pascual up to the point of working with a GUI, and staring up at what appeared to me to be an insurmountable cliff (for a hobbyist developer) with the assurance that the next OS that came out would require scaling at least a part of that mountain over again, I said to myself, "No thank you." Hypercard (and now Livecode) have restored my faith that I CAN produce a useful app in a reasonable time and still have a life. 

That being said,  when you subject a "casual user" to the nuances of Livecode, the frustrations can be enough to put them off, maybe forever. My first attempt to make a database kind of app in Revolution involved using the database connection stuff built into the old fields. After days of frustrating inability to get the daggum thing to work right, I posted on this list and got the response, "Yeah, that has never worked very well. You should probably script it." 

My suggestion to my first example would be having the option to set the icon of a button to a file on the hard drive, and then be able to scale the icon in the button itself, and have that scaling stick. My suggestion to the second example would be to have a real database connection interface in each stack where, once the connection settings to the database were entered and I was connected, I could refer to the data as objects with properties like any other object in Livecode. 

Put cellData(theRow, theColumn, theTable, theDBConnection) into field "fldFirstname"
Put TableData(theColumnList, theRowcount, theStartingRow) into field "fldTableField"

Wouldn't THAT be lovely? (Yes Trevor's sqlYoga goes a long way towards this but not quite all the way, great as it is.) 

I guess I am asking for most of the hard work to be already done for me eh? But isn't that the nature of a Rapid Application Development environment? The question being posed in this thread, seems to me to be, how much of most of the work should RunRev do in order to woo the casual developer? Or have they gone far enough, indeed quite a long way already, and already have the market base they were shooting for, i.e.. us? In other words, it's not a question of principle or implementation, but of degree. 

Bob


On Jul 27, 2011, at 5:35 AM, DunbarX at aol.com wrote:

> In the old days, Hypercard was. like a viral pandemic, infected the world because it was bundled with every Macintosh. It was offered like a promotion, a possibly valuable coupon one gets in the mail, which you will at least read before throwing out, And it became a nerd fad, with many hundreds of thousands of people trying it out. Certainly only a small fraction became enamored; many of those are reading this post.
> 
> 
> Without that once in a lifetime vehicle, it is an uphill battle to engage people who might fall in love with LC if they only were simply exposed to it. Worse, these days, the mindset is that everything comes in small ready-to-go packages, complete and compact. I have three kids who just don't think about building stuff, especially from raw materials. I used to, though.
> 
> 
> Thank the iMac, iPhone, iPod, etc., for creating that expectation, a far cry from reading a bank of eight lights telling you what byte was currently passing by.
> 
> 
> LC should be taught in the ninth grade in every school in the world. 
> 
> 
> Craig Newman