Do you want create an app for Android?
Have you thought about how you want the User Interface to look?
One thing to consider when creating an app is the design. Using conventions and guidelines based on the platform you are creating for your app will help you to avoid two big problems: breaking conventions and clashing styles.
Ever thought that your LiveCode project could be improved by a custom control? Perhaps you want to add a rounded rectangle push button to your stack, where the border color is different to the text color? Maybe you’re thinking of building an app with 10 cards, and each card needs a header bar, and each header bar needs a label, a button, a background graphic, a line graphic… Getting tired just thinking about it? Enter widgets.
Widgets are controls that can be dragged from the tools palette and dropped onto your stack. In LiveCode 8, users now have the ability to write their own custom controls, or widgets, in the new LiveCode Builder language. The purpose of this article is to guide you through the widget writing process in LiveCode Builder, from the very start to using your end product in a LiveCode stack.
read moreFor the past month I’ve been delving deep into the LiveCode IDE, with the purpose of preparing the product to be localised, so that strings in the UI are in the users’ language of choice. Simultaneously, I have been learning a new programming language myself.
One of the newest members of the LiveCode Development team, I joined in September fresh out of University looking forward to immersing myself in the world of software development, and picking up a new programming language to boot. I was excited to learn LiveCode, and seeing how well I’d be able to pick it up – as surely that’s the point, after all.
After a day of settling in and getting myself set-up and ready to work, I began my first project, localising the IDE. Initially, the project required me to trawl through reams of LiveCode script, looking for strings that would need translating, making a note of these strings and passing these strings through a dummy function. The dummy function just returned the strings in all capitals, making it easy to see what had been “translated” and what hadn’t. Ultimately, the localisation function would return the string in the user’s selected language, but for now the project just required that the IDE was prepared for translation and everything that would need eventual translating was documented.
The first stage of the project, while laborious, was an excellent learning curve for me. I was able to get in to the nitty-gritty of the product, see LiveCode being put to use and begin to write a small amount of LiveCode script of my own. I also got to see the ups and downs of changing the IDE through the IDE – a challenge in and of itself – instantly being able to see changes made or managing to break the IDE with one typo! It also highlighted how the product wasn’t designed with localisation in mind, as I came upon obstacles to translation such as images with English text in them.
The next stages, which I am working on now, involve me preparing the strings for translation, creating a tool for the translators and writing the localisation function. It was in these stages of the project that I was really able to start writing my own LiveCode script. Not only was I able to start doing this with relative ease, with some questions for specific situations, I quickly found myself able to fire off script in LiveCode as if I were writing some text in English. Having done a bit of programming at University and an internship in mobile development, I am not a complete novice when it comes to programming. However, I was impressed at how natural programming in LiveCode felt and I’m pleased to be part of a project that is making the product more accessible to budding developers around the world.
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