FT: FieldTrip News

[Curry Kenworthy]

Howdy Folks,

Several of you have inquired lately about the status of FieldTrip and 
I'm pleased to report that we're almost ready for the first beta release!

(It's been a while and I apologize for the delay. My health took a big 
dive just when I was busiest, and I also was waiting for an item from 
another team that will play an important role in this project.)

The tab bar isn't finished yet, but otherwise the FieldTrip toolbar is 
ready to rock your field text. For anyone new to the topic, FieldTrip 
provides a handy cross-platform toolbar for LiveCode 5.5's advanced text 
features. In short, it's like an MS Word styling toolbar for your LC 
fields, from bold and italic to borders and images. Coloring or styling 
is a snap.

In the last few weeks I've developed a skin for the toolbar buttons so 
that the product can be used attractively on the myriad desktop and 
mobile platforms. The skin is flexible on coloring options and designed 
to be CPU-friendly for snappy results on any hardware. Later I'll 
probably make the skin available to use independently of FieldTrip.

Maarten is putting a subset of the toolbar to the test in his product 
now, and I will be skinning the remaining controls and sewing everything 
up for the beta, then I'll get it in your hands. Considerably more will 
be added before the 1.0 release.

We actually had a FieldTrip preview planned to visually present an 
overview of features at the LiveCode Conference earlier this year, but 
due to the hotel internet issues the presenter was not able to receive 
the stack by email in time for the presentation! That was a nifty demo, 
so I'm bringing it back to serve as the hands-on test stack for the beta.

As promised, FieldTrip will be available to the preorder folks firstly, 
and there will be other special bonuses coming as a way of saying thanks 
for your confidence and support in making this library possible! I'll be 
using an off-list method to make this beta available privately. First 
look, first killer app. :)

I still haven't updated my PayPal button, so it's still possible to 
preorder at the old price for a time and get full rights to the private 
beta and any bonuses that will be reserved for those who preorder. But 
the clock is ticking on that; I'll update the button as soon as I get 
caught up on the beta work.

<http://www.curryk.com/fieldtrip-preorder.html>

(There are also higher levels of support available in a drop-down with 
the PayPal button, for those who want me to spend some time exclusively 
on their most desired features.)

For anyone who misses the preorder, after the private beta release I'll 
be posting either a video and/or a limited version of the demo stack to 
see an overview of the features.

I'll post separately about news of my other addons! Thanks to all who 
have written off-list to ask questions and provide encouragement and 
feedback/requests/bug reports on these projects, and I look forward to 
providing a big ole bunch of releases and updates for you mighty soon. 
I've had to lurk a bit to get caught up with work, so I'm glad to be 
posting here again! Regards to all.

Best wishes,

Curry Kenworthy
-- 
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