I’ll be the first to admit it. I’d never touched photoshop before starting this job. I didn’t know anything about design and I certainly didn’t know how to create an image for a mailer.

I may have experienced night sweats in my first few weeks and thought about crying because, spoiled, I’m used to working with Mac products that intuitively know what I want to do and when (why bother thinking when Mac will do it for you)? Famous last words.

Photoshop wanted me to think, plan, and execute. So, I had to prepare. Here’s how I made the Create It With LiveCode mailer campaign.

1. Understand the value. Email marketing is important. I realize anything with the word “email” sounds ancient, but 95% of online consumers have an email account and email marketing returns $44 for every $1 spent. That’s a powerful ROI, so it’s worth asking yourself as you build and grow your business: Do I have a community of people? Am I emailing them? It may be the easiest way to revolutionize your marketing department.

2. Choose a message. Before I can build a mailer, I have to decide what my message will be. The message is the over-arching theme of the mailer and it determines what the image and text reflect. For the Create It With LiveCode campaign, I divided the perks of the Create It With LiveCode course into segments, including the Apple Apps, the Tech and Business Matters Experts, the App Contest (and Prize), and the Skills. Each mailer covered one of these perks as the message.

3. Research. I look for a stock image. We use ThinkStock, but there are lots of good stock photo services out there. With my theme in mind, I find an image that best reflects my main message. Since the course covers Apple’s default apps, I used a lot of Apple App images throughout the mailer campaign to reflect what the course would be teaching and what soon-to-be pros would be learning.

4. Get Busy with Photoshop. Sometimes I simply add text to an image. Other times I have to create an image from scratch, downloading PSDs (Photoshop documents) of IOS apps and placing them over blank phones I pull from ThinkStock. It takes time, but it’s always worth it in the end, especially when I get fancy and create a gif (animated photos moving together as one). I’m starting to develop photoshop skill (and thinking for myself – crazy).

5. Monkey around. Possibly my favorite part of creating a mailer, I put my images into MailChimp once they’re done. MailChimp is the best mass mailing service because it’s fun, easy to use, and you get a high five from the chimp mascot every time you complete a mailer campaign – is there anything better? When it comes to mailers, not really. MailChimp is free, so building your first email campaigns with them is a no-brainer. They also provide sign up forms that you can paste onto your site and use to build your subscriber list. Lastly, MailChimp can schedule mailers in advance, so as I created mailers for the campaign, I could schedule them to go out on the appropriate days.

6. Add Text. My other favorite part. I center my text around my message and my image, highlighting the perks of the Apple Apps, the Business and Tech Matters Experts, or the fact that the course starts soon and the clock is ticking. I always try to keep the text succinct, sharp, and to the point. Because we absorb a lot of content throughout the day and some of us (namely me) have short attention spans, I try to make my content easy to see, understand, and retain in a short amount of time.

7. Add a Subject Line. Every mailer needs a great subject line. Without a strong subject line, the email will be completely ignored and everything else in the mailer (image, text, etc) is a wasted effort. I try to think of something that sounds intriguing – something that I know I would respond to. i.e. “Note to Self” sounds interesting because it leaves the reader wondering, “What? What should I make a note of? Something fun? Something cool? I don’t want to miss out!”

8. Test it. I always send a test mailer (or 10). In a test, it’s important to check that my images link to the right web pages and that the text reads well without any typos. It can be tedious looking at tests over and over, but I do catch things and I’m always relieved I saw them before the public did. To be professional, you have to look professional.

9. Send it. This is when all my hard work pays off. I made a killer image, I wrote savvy text, and the test says everything’s a go – so I can send it. Bye, Mailer!

10. Check the reports. I check the campaign report within 12-24 hours of sending the mailer. The report can tell me how many people opened the mailer and how many people clicked on it. This is a good way for me to determine whether my text, images, and themes are resonating with my community. If no one is opening them, I may need a different kind of subject line. If no one is clicking on it, I can try adjusting my image design. The beauty of it is that I can play with it until I find something that works consistently.

What do you think? Do you have a community? Do you have a subscriber list? Do you send mailers? How can you improve your business with an email marketing campaign?

Did you join the LiveCode Hour of Code? I did. Ok sure I was still on company time, so I was getting paid for it, but let me tell you – I am impressed with how awesome a coder I am.

Awesome coder – too much? I built the messages app and the user interface for the calculator app in 1 hour, that sounds to me like the work of an awesome coder.

Here’s the proof of my success with the Create it with LiveCode Hour of Code. Note – the below is not a screenshot directly from the iphone, it’s actually what I made in 1 hour! Seriously!

Here is the best thing about this demo and the Create it with LiveCode course – Everyone Can Do it. Everyone Can Be An Awesome Coder, Everyone Can Create Apps.

If you didn’t get a chance to catch the demo – it has been recorded and all the materials have been stored on the LiveCode hour of code page.

It’s a short blog post, but trust me, go check out the video, build these apps, get ahead of the game and if you can – get signed up to the Create it with LiveCode Course, it’s gonna be fun.

Happy Holidays Everyone

Steven Crighton

Digital Marketing Manager

Awesome Coder

During the last month I have been switching between translating the IDE to Greek, and refining LC 6.7 and 7.0 releases, in terms of fixing bugs. Some bugs are quite easy to fix. Some others though, can be quite tricky. The first thing to do is locate where the bug comes from, and the next step is to actually fix it. In some cases, tracking down the cause of the bug is not that obvious. However, if you can find a previous version of the code where the bug was not present, then you can use some Git tools to find the specific commit in the history which introduced the bug. You could try to check out each commit, build it, and check if the bug is present or not. Usually there are a large number of commits, so this can take a really long time. This is a linear search. Hopefully, we can do much better by doing a binary search.  This is where the git bisect command comes in.

What is git bisect?

Git bisect is an extremely useful command in the Git version control system. The bisect command does a binary search through your commit history to help you identify which commit introduced an issue. It is quite quick. Imagine that between a working version of the code and a buggy one, there are a few hundreds commits, say N. Using git bisect requires only log(N) steps!

How to use it?

1. You start by specifying two states, a bad and a good one. A state can be a commit hash, a branch name, or a tag name:

In this example, HEAD is the current revision (ie the bad one), and 6.7.0-dp-6 is a tag of a good revision.

2. We then test it for the presence of the bug. We inform Git if the bug is there by running git bisect good, or git bisect bad:

3. Repeating the same process bring us closer to the faulty commit:

4. If we ever arrive at a commit that won’t build for a known or irrelevant reason, or if we just don’t know if the specific revision is good or bad, then we simply run git bisect skip. It doesn’t define it as good or bad, picks a neighbor commit and moves on:

5. Voilà! We fould the commit that introduced the bug!

After finding the problematic commit, we can see the diffs in github, and find out the cause of the bug.

6. We then move back to the HEAD (git bisect reset) and fix the bug!

For some time, I have been wishing that I could have some kind of command-line oriented functionality to LiveCode, beyond writing scripts with LiveCode Server. What if I could pipe things directly to it, or run it as an interactive shell? Being able to very quickly make use of the text handling in LiveCode would be extremely handy for certain command line oriented types of tasks. Alas, this is not possible with LiveCode or LiveCode Server as it currently stands. However, after some thought, I concluded that it should be possible to put together a script to provide this functionality.

Click to Zoom

After some time, I had produced a script which operates as a simple shell type interface. But how does it work? It’s actually fairly simple. The script is a LiveCode Server script, designed to be invoked via command line. When it starts up, it reads in the options passed to it on the command line to determine how it should behave. The options passed to it are in the $x variables, starting at $0. $# tells us how many were passed.

 There are currently two modes: interactive and execute. We can also pass the -p option to tell it to expect data to be piped to it, and read it into a variable called ‘input’. If we pass it the -e option it starts up in execute mode, and expects you to have specified a command for it to run. It then exits after running the command. Usage for this would be like “lcsh -e ‘put hello world’”. Otherwise, it starts up in interactive mode.

Execute mode simply takes the last command line option and uses do on it, then quits. Interactive mode reads 1 line from stdin at a time (i.e. it reads 1 typed line by the user at a time) and then determines what should be done with it. It uses the isCommand function to check the $PATH environment variable (which contains all of the directories which should be looked in for executable programs) to see if what was entered was a utility that is already installed, such as the standard Linux utilities. If it was, it uses shell() to execute the entered command. Otherwise, it uses the do command to execute it as normal LiveCode code, catching any generated errors so that they can be displayed without causing the program to exit:

There is also the optEnabled function that was referenced above. This checks to see if the program was loaded with a specific option enabled:

 This is quite clunky and has many, many problems – for example, there’s no ability to pipe the output of some LiveCode to another program in interactive mode, and you can’t open another program that requires interaction. However, I think that with a lot more work, this could become quite a robust and useful tool. It already provides some very handy functionality in it’s current state, namely that I can pipe to it for text parsing:

Click to Zoom

I will probably keep chipping away at this until I can use it as my primary command line interface. You can get the full code here: http://jasminedavid.on-rev.com/lcsh.txt

Editors note: Kevin sent a personal letter to the community today, and after reading it I asked permission to reprint it here. He agreed 🙂

As the CEO and custodian of LiveCode I believe passionately in a world where everyone can create apps. We’ve worked hard on finding ways to empower more of you to be able to build the app of your dreams. We’ve enjoyed a great deal of success over the years, doubling the interest and uptake of computer science courses wherever we’ve been adopted, and helping to transform many budding new coders into entrepreneurs running businesses small and large. I’d like to express a heartfelt thank you for your support over the years, not least with our hugely successful crowd funding campaigns and open source initiative. We couldn’t have done it without you.

We know LiveCode is the easiest, most productive way to build an app. But if I’m honest, we’ve always found it challenging to get a new user over the initial learning curve. After all, even the English-based LiveCode language still has vocabulary and concepts that need to be understood. And as easy as it is, like learning anything worthwhile – whether a language, an instrument or a sport, it requires some effort.

As CEO I’ve come to be very familiar with a pattern. A new user starts using our platform. For the first few days they orientate themselves. Ask a lot of questions. Scratch their heads. A few more days in and something clicks. The lightbulb moment occurs. We know, from all sorts of feedback from tens of thousands of users, that once you “get it”, once you get over that initial hump and have your “aha” moment, you never look back. You love LiveCode. You discover new horizons and are able to create things you never thought you could. The problem we’ve encountered has been that far too many people don’t make it through those first few days. Until now.

We’ve been searching for the right path for you, our audience, to get quickly and easily into coding with LiveCode and creating apps. We’ve tried a number of different approaches, with varying success. We’ve created academies, we’ve run summer schools, we’ve got involved with the Hour of Code initiative. Each has been successful to an extent, but we’ve been searching for ways to make it even easier.

That’s why I’m so very excited about our new Create it with LiveCode Course. 

Why is this course so different? Well firstly, it’s results based. You don’t learn theory, you learn to do a specific thing, and then start to gain understanding on how and why it worked like that. Secondly, it’s focused on modern mobile apps. You’ll learn transferable skills (that you can apply to the desktop and server too) but the focus is squarely on mobile. Thirdly, you’re learning to build apps that you already know. We’ll show you how to create perfect replicas of the apps that already ship on your phone. That way you’ll know when you’ve got it right. You’ll know how to do everything you need to do to create a successful app, such as access all the sensors on a device. If you can build these apps – the same ones the pro’s build – you’ll be able to build anything. Fourthly, we reveal one of the best kept secrets of the LiveCode environment – how to use it to seamlessly integrate cloud with your apps in a way no other language can approach. Next, we focus on not just the process of building an app but also everything else you need to know about the apps business, doing market research, promotion and marketing.

But most importantly of all, the thing that really convinced me, that made me go wow, yes, I have to get this course into the hands of potential coders everywhere, is the proven results. I saw the figures. 93% of students who took this course, were able to build their app at the end of it. And these were students with absolutely no past experience whatsoever. Impressive validation. If you go through this course, and put in the work and the hours, you will be able to build your app. We’re so confident of that we guarantee it. If you follow the course and can’t build the app you want at the end we’ll give you your money back. It’s as simple as that.

If you want to read more about the story of how this course came about, check out my blog post here.

Ways to Get Involved

This is far more than just a new course, its a massive opportunity to take the next step in delivering on our vision that everyone can create apps. If you believe in that vision then I’d like to ask for your support. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re an existing power user, there are so many ways to get involved. Here are some of the top ones.

Hour of Code

As you may be aware, the 8th to the 14th of December is CS Education Week. There’s been a lot of talk over the last year or so about the “Hour of Code” initiative. The world has woken up to what we’ve known all along – that coding is the new literacy, that everyone should be able to do it. We’ll be participating in the hour of code by making available the very first week of our Create it Course for free.

You can take part in the live webinar on the 11th of December at 10AM PST. 

Bring your relatives, bring your friends, bring your neighbors, bring your taxi driver, bring anyone else you can!

We’re excited about the Hour of Code but we know that while an hour is a great starting point, it isn’t enough by itself. The Create it Course is a great next step. We bridge the gap between that initial hour and becoming a professional coder. Learn more about the course here. 

Affiliate Program – Spread the Word!

If you’re an existing LiveCoder who would like to help spread the word, we’ve set up an affiliate program so you can support our vision and get rewarded. We invite you to evangelize LiveCode and the Create it Course. You can earn 25% of every sale you make to a  new LiveCoder. Feature the platform you know and love on your website, get posters you can put in shop windows, get a QR code to pass out, and earn credit every time someone signs up as a result. Email us at support@livecode.com to get started!

The Perfect Gift

For the first time ever, we invite you to give the gift of a new skill that will last a lifetime this Christmas. The Create it Course is battle tested on people with only basic computer skills, and no coding at all. This course is suitable for anyone aged 13+. This is a real opportunity to spread the deep digital literacy you’ve grown to know and love with LiveCode to someone else, a son or daughter, a grandparent or friend, anyone you think would appreciate it.

Not only do we cover everything you need to build apps but we’re bringing in business experts to walk you through the process of building a successful business around an app. Plus we have a great contest with prizes that include exposure for your app and a trip to the LiveCode World Conference in 2015. 

As a reward back to you we invite you to take the course yourself for free. This means you have a fantastic opportunity to mentor your nominee, and help them through their LiveCode journey. To give Create it with LiveCode as a gift, check the “this is a gift” box next to the purchase button, here. We’ll send you a gift certificate you can print and instructions for full access to the course.

We hope you’ll get involved. Sign up now to get the first lesson in this course free and participate in Hour of Code next week. Give the course as a gift. Sign up as an affiliate. Or get the course if you haven’t already. Remember places are limited.

Thanks so much for all your support. 

Kind Regards,

Kevin Miller

LiveCode CEO