Where does survive the inventive user ?

[Timothy Miller]

A one-seat, one-platform version of LiveCode is quite affordable.

Here's a scheme that might draw new, untrained users. Make LC into some kind of a game.

It starts with most of LC's features crippled or hidden. To unlock features you have to solve challenges. Step one, obviously -- Make a field, a button, and a script that puts "hello world" into the field. That unlocks one or two more commands, properties, objects, or whatever. Then you've got to do something a little harder, and so on. Lots of hints, prompts and mini-tutorials along the way. A moderately intelligent user who goofs around with it now and then could get pretty skilled within six months, or less.

I'm not in favor of Open Source for LC, for the usual reasons. It might be interesting to see what happens if a crippled form of LC is sold as a game, as described above, at a rather low price, perhaps free, with copyrights protected. It could catch, on virally perhaps. Those who become skilled and remain interested could upgrade to the full-featured version.

There's no obvious reason the "HyperCard revolution" could not happen again. I'd love to see it.

I meet lots of young people who want to learn to "program." Most of them don't even know what that means, or they think running a malware-dection app and reinstalling the OS is "programming."

When I was first learning hyperCard, I had a HyperCard stack that taught you how to use HyperCard. That's how I started. Don't remember much about it.

Cheers,

Tim

On Jul 28, 2011, at 9:05 AM, Bob Sneidar wrote:

> I'm going to say doom. I purchased the lifetime On-Rev and the 5 year license when it was offered, partly because I want to see these guys thrive. If they do not, then sooner or later Livecode is destined to fail. So I invested in them when they needed capital to grow. If they had stock I would probably by some. What if they had faltered back in the Revolution 2.0 days? I hate to think of having to do things without a datagrid, without behaviors that make things like sqlYoga possible. That was HUGE! 
> 
> Also, it's the focus on making Livecode a particular thing, and not what a lot of other developers want it to be that lends itself to continued innovation along "the right lines" and I think Open Source would not maintain that vision. RunRev takes great care to prevent making other people's past projects obsolete by ensuring the way things currently work will work tomorrow (sometimes to my disappointment). I do not think that Open Sourcing Livecode would preserve that consideration for backwards compatibility. 
> 
> Bob
>