Connections.

This afternoon, for one reason and another, I am temporarily disconnected from the internet, and I’m finding it pretty traumatic. I’m using the time to write a blog post, but even this simple activity is hampered by my inability to look up things online, check my facts on Wikipedia, and locate suitable images to illustrate my points.

Which really is the point of today’s post. Our lives these days are governed by connections and many of the apps we write can be seen as collections of information gathered, often live, from the wonderful world wide web at our fingertips. So many apps are data driven, grabbing information as it is needed and serving it up to the end user, hot from the grill. For example, my desktop calendar has of its own volition located the calendar on my phone and now startles me daily by popping up notifications and reminders when I least expect them. In my defence, some of these events were not even entered by me, they are events created by other users whose calendars talk to my calendar, which then talks to my phone and reminds me I should now be somewhere entirely different, doing something I wish I had been allowed to forget about. Push notifications in action. Terrific.

LiveCode is excellent glue. It’s great at sticking together content from a wide variety of sources and making it available in one place (your app) in a tidy way (your lovely app interface) so that the end user gets a beautiful seamless experience. At one end of the spectrum you could pull together images from a users camera, data from a website, messages from other users and create, perhaps, a fabulous recipe app that lets you take a picture of the meal you created and share it with friends. Or at the other end it could be used to create a heavy duty app for crunching through masses of data and finding trends or specific information, with its easy database connectivity. Big Data is Big Business and LiveCode is good at it.

I find all the uses that our users find for LiveCode fascinating. These days, the apps created are rarely isolated self-contained items, they are part of our interconnected lifestyle, and participating to a greater or lesser extent in the huge global network that is the World Wide Web.

You could say LiveCode is truly live.