Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

[richmond62]

"That" is seems unlikely that they (LC central) will reach their self-appointed target sum:
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I DO have a sum of money set aside which I would donate to something that I felt had "balls"; but what I found out
during the Xavvi Q & A came across as unconvincing and a bit nebulous.

[FourthWorld]

But it was nice to see your smiling face.

[richmond62]

Half of the smiles were nervousness.

[richmond62]

AND, when I asked what would be done if the funding target were not reached on the comments page it was removed.

Why could they have not given a straight answer?

[richmond62]

And, quite frankly, I wonder if 'that lot' have any bright ideas how to sell either LC or Xavvi to anyone but the
pre-initiated:

"I’d like to start by clarifying that this blog post is intended for people already using the LiveCode development tool, looking at Xavvi and wondering what it means for them."

https://livecode.com/my-view-on-xavvi-w ... d-to-know/

Sorry: we who have been chanting the mantra for a while now are already so bombed out of our heads we don't need convincing.
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"Once you are hooked, you are hooked. For us as a company, this sounds like an incredible thing to have. A product that hooks people in and for those people to be loyal and stay hooked for many years! So what’s the problem?"

The problem is that you are bloody bad at hooking people initially.

And how the flying fudge NOT having a free starter tier will help that I just do not know.

You can have all sorts of fancy 'cherries on the cake' [err . . . Xavvi], but, first, people have to BUY the cake [and a week's trail is NOT enough
to hook anyone] to bung the cherries on top of.

[FourthWorld]

AND, when I asked what would be done if the funding target were not reached on the comments page it was removed.

Why could they have not given a straight answer?

I see your question there, with Heather's reply.

[richmond62]

Thank you: for some reason when I posted previously it was not showing up:
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[FourthWorld]

Thank you: for some reason when I posted previously it was not showing up:
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Another user of these forums noted a similar delay. I can't imagine what causes it.

[Kdjanz]

It worked that way for me too.

It appears that all new questions are taken off line until they are answered.

[richmond62]

Which, of course, means they can be taken off completely if they prove too painful.

[FourthWorld]

Which, of course, means they can be taken off completely if they prove too painful.

In theory, anything is possible. But I prefer to avoid conjecture, esp. in the absence of any supporting data.

So far we've seen a few questions which one might consider pointed, and the LC team has both allowed the question and provided an answer.

If the delay is for moderation, anyone who's ever admin'd any web property that allows open inputs can appreciate the value of requiring human review before whatever is posted becomes shared.

Vast bot armies roam the web looking for open forms to do all manner of undesirable things...

[richmond62]

Maybe I'm an intellectual snob [OK, OK< I am an intellectual snob], but vacuous quotes plucked from some talking head, containing
unverifiable statements don't sell things to me: and I really wonder how many other people they sell them to? Probably NOT to people
already on LC's mailing list.

Why do 'that lot' keep doing things which seem to insult the intelligence of their potential market?
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I cannot see a bakery, a butcher's, a chain of supermarkets, or a school needing A.I.

I may be wrong: but one thing I am not going to do is produce some DOGMATIC statement which runs the risk of
leaving egg all over my face later on.

And taking someone else's (decontextualised) dogmatic statement and using it as a marketing tool is, well, crass.

[tperry2x]

I think they have personally got their potential market 100% correct.
It seems to me they are taking Livecode in the direction of powerpoint with some AI thrown in. That's where they think their user base is.

For those who will want an IDE - a proper xtalk-centric development environment, let's continue to do that.

Let's do our own thing.

[richmond62]

The ONLY problem with 'Powerpont' with some AI thrown in is that lots of other companies are offering the same sort of thing.

[richmond62]

Ah, now, would you look at that:

https://livecode.com/empowering-voices- ... -livecode/

it warmed the cockles of my heart until I remembered meeting Phil Jimmieson in about 1982 at Newcastle when I was studying at Durham,
only fleetingly, admittedly, but also that I came up against his name again in 1997 when I was working with HyperCard at the United Arab Emirates University in the U.A.E. . . .

Obviously, having met him in 1982 (when I was studying PASCAL . . . fioch) and registering he was a "bright spark", when I came across his name pn the internet in the UAE it flagged something up in my brain.

https://etd.uum.edu.my/735/2/Norida_Muhd_Dams_95.pdf

And realising that Jimmieson is/was an old HyperCard hand, so this:

"David suggested LiveCode to his lead developer Phil Jimmieson who after playing around with the tool for a while managed to swiftly create a multi-platform version of In My Shoes, overcoming the complexities of the program thanks to LiveCode’s user-friendly nature."

while suggesting that Jimmieson was 'virginal' re xTalk programming before he encountered LiveCode was NOTHING of the sort.
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I wouldn't doubt that for a minute.

Except that is might not be quite so 'amazing' given Jimmieson's track record and experience.

What this article does do is potentially mislead people into thinking that they, possibly without either Jimmieson's long, long experience
with all types of software development, and David Glasgow's engagement with LiveCode, they can 'just' whip something up with little or no
effort in LiveCode.

David Glasgow has been poking around LiveCode since at least 2011:

https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=u ... id+Glasgow

which is NOT the impression created by that article.

And, as far as I can tell, In My Shoes has also been in development since at least 2011.

https://www.inmyshoes.org.uk/In_My_Shoes/Blog/Blog.html

https://livecode1001.blogspot.com/2013/ ... lings.html

Of course, using 12 year old software to promote a currently available programming package seems perfectly OK to me,
but that is NOT stated clearly anywhere in that article.

-------

It does also look like scraping the barrel because, just maybe, our friends cannot come up within anything a bit more up to date.

[FourthWorld]

I think they have personally got their potential market 100% correct.
It seems to me they are taking Livecode in the direction of powerpoint with some AI thrown in. That's where they think their user base is.

For those who will want an IDE - a proper xtalk-centric development environment, let's continue to do that.

Let's do our own thing.

I've been thinking about ways to enhance this FOSS project. But the thing that prevents me from taking action is the thing that's been keeping the lights on at LC Ltd all these years:

The people earning a living with LiveCode are mostly those publishing proprietary standalones.

GPL has tremendous opportunity for internal use within companies and both internal and external use in any orgs where GPL is a good fit, such as EDU.

But funding comes from where funds exist. And aside from the possibility of the occasional grant, per-seat software licensing generates revenue. And proprietary standalones aren't something a GPL governed edition can deliver.

If an org was formed as a 501c3 nonprofit, it may be able to attract corporate grants. But having served on the boards of a few 501c3s, creating and maintaining such an org is nontrivial.

[richmond62]

I do wish Paul would:

1. Come out of the woodwork a bit more often.

2. Set up some sort of open-ended fund raiser [OK, the $50 sitting in my PayPal account is peanuts; but peanuts are better than thin air, and if
quite a few people could donate a few bags of peanuts Paul might be able to take time off from other concerns to speed things up a bit.]

Your point, Fourthworld, is well put:

The people earning a living with LiveCode are mostly those publishing proprietary standalones.

BUT, I cannot be the only person who, while not earning anything directly from using LiveCode, is enhancing his earning power by using LiveCode.

------ Personal, and possibly boring bit.

I run an EFL [English as a Foreign Language] school in a small town in a small country at the 'bag-end' of Europe, and have done for 19 years:
it is what is normally termed a 'measured success' insofar as it feeds 2 families (mine and my assistant's), but that's all; but that is all I want, having no urges to become very rich.

It has 2 classrooms in which there are computers running Xubuntu Linux with a desktop mucked around to serve my teaching purposes: they deliver (at last count) 67 LiveCode standalones for learning support and reinforcement that I have developed over the last 18 years. I am continuing to make more of these standalones as and when the need arises.

Children (6-18) attend 2 90 minute sessions a week in groups of about 6. They, normally, spend about 30-40 minutes working on a standalone appropriate to their English level and the grammar/vocabulary they are studying at that moment.

Without those programs my school would be quite a lot more 2-dimensional and not as interesting or effective.

Whether the presence of those programs in any way affect parents' decisions to send their children to me I have no way of knowing: but I don't advertise my school either; so this all happens by word of mouth.

I have sufficient evidence over such a long time running my school that those standalones are a source of stimulus to the children attending.

So, were Paul to set up some sort of funding channel, I would find a way to make some sort of regular donation [ which, by the by, would be far cheaper than investing in an LC commercial licence].

As ALL my LC standalones have been built with either Open source versions of RR/LC, or with the RR 2.2.1 Free version for Linux issued in conjunction with Novell, they can in no way be described as 'proprietary'; even if for the only reason that they are issued as 32-bit and 64-bit standalones for Linux and never 'escape' from my school, unless, for some daft reason I allow other educators to download source stacks (free of charge).

------End of personal soap opera.

I find it hard to believe that all of the erstwhile 'community' who leveraged (and may continue to leverage - who knows as most of them went distinctly, and oddly, silent when the Open Source version was discontinued) LC Community were only doing that for 'fun' and 'fun' alone.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Sorry I haven't been around much, very busy running in the 'rat race' lately.

I've made a bunch of 'domain specific' tools in xTalk over the years, particularly using HyperCard + AppleScript in the 'Desktop Publishing' era) to do a lot of real-world revenue generating work in printing. Often these have been customized to speed up specific work-flows. It certainly can help generate funds beyond selling / supporting apps to a few companies or on the crApp store, in the right situations.

It's great for whipping up a tool to fill a need that haven't been filled by any other software yet and perhaps never will be filled because there simply isn't enough of a market to bother making a commercial product of such a tool. It's like my wife, who works in healthcare, often complains that there are medicines that exist that can treat or cure not-all-that-common-health problems or diseases that do not get manufactured because there simply isn't enough people with that problem to make it profitable for Pharma Co. to bother manufacturing 'whatever-drug' (and yet they hold a patten on 'whatever-drug' so no one else can make it). If you're the person with the rare disease then you likely don't care if it's profitable or not, you just want help with your problem, right? Bill Atkinson may have nailed it down when he said HyperCard was a solution in search of a problem.

The GPL license does not mean you can't sell software you make with it, it just means you just have to publish the source code for your software to comply with the license, any other problems like with app stores are due to policies of companies (Apple in mind).

I've decided I'm going to start releasing some of these projects Ive tinkered around with forever, as prebuilt-standalone apps (along with source files of course) on GitHub and/or somewhere like Itch.IO. I think if there was more of that sort of sharing (as there seemed to be more of back in the 'AOL' good ol'days ) it could be a good thing for helping generate interest from hobbyists, people with casual interest in programming, and/or an unfulfilled software need.
The ones I had in mind are:

BlackJack game, and perhaps other card-games, already have a optimized Playing Deck SVG graphics lib and '21' game logic for this.

'QuackMan ' xTalk pac-man clone (and plans for a political parody version called OrangeMan), Space Invaders, Asteroids, Tetris, etc.. A language should have builds of these common standard relatively (compared to modern video games) simple arcade games, if not then I'd have to wonder is this thing really even worth learning?

An (Updated and WORKING) mp3 + sound player, I modeled the one I worked on the great and simple Mac-classic app called 'SoundApp'. Unlike iTunes, this app plays MIDI (could add .mod files and more later) as well mp3, AIF, WAV, etc.

A drum machine App (inspired by th classic mac app 'Virtual Drummer')

My favorite project, a Virtual-Bass-Guitar++ (with Nashville Cord System chord / circle of fifths chord triggering), an on-screen musical instrument like nothing else out there. I've had TONs of fun developing and using this thing, which is the product of an idea I had 30+ years ago, first implemented by res-edit hacking an old freeware app (QuertyTunes was the name, IIRC) in the early 1990s, now built in OXT and can use Apple music API's and/or FluidSynth (Cross-platform). For me, the fun and satisfaction I've gotten out of building / using this is all the pay I need to keep me working at it.

Mobile (Android, but I now use iOS too) experiments:
A Tip / 'Split the Bill' calculator.
A file explorer (attempt at a 'Finder'-like File Explorer for Android)

BTW, I got some good news today as a community member reported being able to edit the Engine build scripts to build entirely from source on Linux.

[tperry2x]

..I got some good news today as a community member reported being able to edit the Engine build scripts to build entirely from source on Linux.

So is that producing a build of the engine on Linux?
using updated libraries and dependencies to address security issues?

So, do we have a ready-to-use appimage of this anywhere? Windows? MacOS 14 Sonoma? Arm support?

Any news greatly appreciated. I would like to use this for some upcoming projects, but would prefer if it was using an updated and patched engine as the apps I create may be used in a production environment where security matters.

[richmond62]

LC 963 is currently NOT on MacOS 14 Developer preview.

I have sent a report to Apple.

There was a similar problem with the first MacOS 13 public beta which was sorted out.

So an OXT build that runs on MacOS 14 now would steal a march on our friends in Scotland.