Achilles Heel of Livecode

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

@ richard

I love LiveCode, use it every day, probably till the day I die, if I not meditating, singing or swinging kettle bells, and have invested in every offer presented by Kevin since you "turned me on Metacard" when I used Supercard and was looking for bigger solutions, and even bought into Revolution before it signed the agreement with Scott Raney -- I think that was circa 1990 when you sent that email.  And now I have business license "for life"  and I have a lot of respect for the team and what they try to do on some many platforms

Having said that, I have been ranting on and off the past ten years, about the Achilles Heel which is the "busted ankle" in Livecode.  Simply this: 

Smooth Motion Graphics.

"We shouldn't be scripting scrollers,"

 is merely a "symptom" of a larger problem/gap/haitus in vision for the future. 

Now you and I and plenty of old timers know that, e.g. the "my app" could not be duplicated by some other language or "HTML5" without spending 10 times the $ and time. I've been told that

 "Oh sure we could do that on "React/Elm/[or any other language]" (SivaSiva app) but... uh, we could not make that Word Puzzle thing you did, and that Module (stack) you made would take five time the money and effort work. But, ours will look so professional!"

So why will "The Other Thing" look "So Professional?"

 Simple: scrolling, easing, bouncing, smooth scrolling, ken burns effects and cool transitions.

I am not talking "animation" perse. Just the above. And scrolling is at ground zero of these "effects" .  It one thing to know, after 20 years of HTML, web work, PHP, Javascript, that Livecode "will be the best tool for this project in order to bring it to completion in 1/5 the time" 

It's totally another thing for LC to stand alongside other languages to be tested by newbies who are

a) content producers want to develop apps - photoshop, illustration, Sketch expert...--  huge market there, but they have high production values, expectations on the "look/feel" of the first card they make. Much of which could be easily fix by tweaking the IDE.
b) a complete newbie e.g 17-year old whose been using a phone for three years, and the app he sees "do cool stuff"  but he can't make his LC app "do cool stuff" 
c) old school programmer who is tired of the horrible world of JS, PHP, C++ and wants to have "fun" building solutions.

All three markets have no idea what LC can do. They test drive it, and the Achilles Heel kicks in: nothing appears to "work smoothly" (we can't even run an animated GIF in LC while doing any else on the phone) and they are on to other languages.

Kevin said in an interview in California, that he wanted LiveCode to be in the top ten languages... until we fix the Achilles Heel in the "look and feel of what you produce" in Livecode, it will never happen. For every 50 who register for a trial, I really wonder how many actually "sign up", maybe 1-3? They are who see the potential for doing "in house tools/behind the scenes software"  that don't really care how it looks...

 I hope I am wrong...or wish that in 2 years, I will be "wrong" 

BR





We shouldn't be scripting scrollers.

If the control we placed on the card scrolls, it should scroll.  Doesn't 
matter if it's Mac or Windows or Linux.  Shouldn't matter if it's iOS or 
Android.

Manually typing an interaction overlay is bizarre savagery better left 
for those with a typing fetish than developers who want to be productive 
using visual development tools like LiveCode.

That this has not been addressed in the product -- even as so many of us 
have scripted libraries to take care of this automatically in script -- 
has always been concerning.

And as we approach the 10th anniversary of iPhone, that this has never 
been taken care of, or even put on a road map, the concern has grown.

Vision, anyone?

#UserExperience
#EmbraceVisualProgramming
#xTalksRule
#SomeoneHasToSayIt
#WhyIsNoOneSayingIt