The Imitation Game

[richmond62]

This is one of my "old chestnuts", but it is a chestnut that can be used on many levels.

One of the ways I keep my ageing brain going is to download (or try online) a game, play the game 3-4 times and concentrate on its FUNCTIONALITY.

I then try to make a CLONE of it in LiveCode/OpenXTalk where:

1. Quite obviously I have NO access to the underlying code.

2. I supply my own graphic elements.

This has also proven useful for children doing final projects after a 4 week course.

As LiveCode (unless it goes under) will develop new features which we may or may not find useful, we can code our OpenXTalk
to produce the same functionality WITHOUT ripping off LiveCode's code.

GIMP has successfully been duplicating the functionality of Adobe Photoshop for years

https://www.gimp.org/

as has INKSCAPE being doing the same for Adobe Illustrator

https://inkscape.org/

not to mention LibreOffice and Microsoft Office: https://www.libreoffice.org/

ReactOS has been duplicating the functionality of Windows NT to such an extent that something like 90% of
programs written for Microsoft Windows run inside ReactOS

https://reactos.org

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Indeed!

I'd love for some more people to take up working on LCB modules/libraries/widgets to expand the capabilities of OpenXTalk, completely regardless of what LC does going forward! LCB, at least for FFI and tapping into Apple Objective C, is NOT always as difficult as people seem to think. Depending on what API you want to use, it can be fairly easy once you understand some of the basic concepts.

I recently "accidentally" wrapped a big chunk of Apple's PDFkit API, but that's only available on macOS and iOS (although I believe the NSWindow, NSView-widget part would need to be adjusted for iOS, which uses the newer UIView).
https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.p ... 60#p208760

I've gotten fairly good at tapping into a bunch of macOS APIs (Objective C) with LCB, and did a bunch of work on a cross platform wrapper for lib FluidSynth (C++) that was initially started by a couple of other users on the forums.

I'm not a fan of, nor regular user of, Windows OS, and I'm a novice when it comes to Linux, so I'm not familiar with the APIs commonly used on those platforms. We could certainly use some help there! According to some LCB docs incorporating GTK views on Linux into "native widgets" is actually quite simple. I've yet to try that though.

From glancing at the LC 9.6.4 it looks like they've wrapped Google's PDFium library for their business customers as a replacement for the old XPDF lib they used to use. I'd prefer to just use commonly available, preinstalled system API's so as to not bloat this OXT beast anymore than it already is.

I've been told that this tapping of proprietary closed system APIs is an exception that is allowed for by GPL or otherwise OK with the GPL3 licensing. I'm just starting to read up a lot on Free Software Foundation's site on GPL and things like that. It's a bit of a maze.

OT: I like your new avatar, particularly the skirt ( just teasing, we have old families friends that likes to get theirs out for formal occasions, so that's quite an over-used joke for me.)

[susan]

GIMP has successfully been duplicating the functionality of Adobe Photoshop for years

Photopea is a good Photoshop clone that runs in the browser. In many ways it is so close to the real thing that when I need to figure out how to get a certain effect, Photoshop tutorials usually have the answer.

https://www.photopea.com/

On the same way of thinking, if an xTalk environment could be written in Javascript, it could run on any platform with a browser. Of course that is not the focus here, but I can dream.

[richmond62]

As LiveCode can run on Windows, Linux and Macintosh at the moment the only real reason for
trying to write a clone in Java to function inwith a web-browser would be if there was
suddenly a mad, mad rush for installing Haiku [https://www.haiku-os.org/] on machines,
or sudden mass adoption of machines running RISC-OS [https://www.riscosopen.org/content/],
which would be extremely kinky and unlikely.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

GIMP has successfully been duplicating the functionality of Adobe Photoshop for years

Photopea is a good Photoshop clone that runs in the browser. In many ways it is so close to the real thing that when I need to figure out how to get a certain effect, Photoshop tutorials usually have the answer.

https://www.photopea.com/

On the same way of thinking, if an xTalk environment could be written in Javascript, it could run on any platform with a browser. Of course that is not the focus here, but I can dream.

That's an excellent web tool. I doubt I could use that my work in prepress but I could see it being very convenient for lighter duties.

LC does have a CGI / CLI headless version and HTML5 deploy that can be used for web stuff,
but the more xTalk interpreters the better IMO.

There's ViperCard, that's built with JS!
https://www.vipercard.net