Fence Painting or Coding Challenges?

It’s true for many of us that we have extra time on our hands at the moment. That extra time presents the opportunity to start or finish those tasks you’ve always been meaning to do. For me that could have been finally getting round to painting the garden fence five years after it was put up (unpainted), clearing out the garage, or sorting out my junk room – I mean spare room! I can confirm that after what has been about a month of me being at home I have not started any of those jobs. I have however tried to build a mini-golf course in my back garden and, which you may be more interested in hearing about, got stuck into some coding challenges.

I am not a developer, not even close, but I have always enjoyed trying to make things in LiveCode. I’ve prototyped a couple of UI’s in LiveCode and built a few really simple apps to help with daily tasks at work. This time instead of building something using LiveCode I wanted to challenge myself to add something to LiveCode.

My Coding Challenge

I may be the only person who has ever been annoyed by this, but from creating UI prototypes in Adobe XD or Moqups I am used to ordering the layers of the objects by right-clicking on the object and sending it back 1 or bringing it the front etc. That functionality already exists in LiveCode I hear you cry. Yes, it does, but not where I wanted it, on that right-click menu, which is where it makes the most sense to me.

With no IDE editing experience, I jumped in, found the correct file and started breaking things.

The one neat thing I found is you can edit the IDE files locally inside LiveCode and even if you make a horrible job and break everything, when you restart LiveCode it reverts to how things were previously.

Before I talk any more about what I did I must disclose what help I got from The LiveCode Team. Back in November I spoke to Ali about this. I told him I wanted to make some menu changes to LiveCode and he told me which file I need to be looking at and how to open that file in the IDE.

He told me that to add the menu item I need to be looking here – https://github.com/livecode/livecode-ide/blob/develop/Toolset/palettes/menubar/revmenubar.livecodescript#L2133

And to add the switch I need to be looking here – https://github.com/livecode/livecode-ide/blob/develop/Toolset/palettes/menubar/revmenubar.livecodescript#L2551

I had no idea what the switch was at this time but that was enough to get me started – I opened up the message box and entered

edit the script of stack "revMenuBar"

I won’t talk you through step by step exactly what I did but I can, however, say that I did manage to get this working successfully – You can see the pull request here if you are interested – https://github.com/livecode/livecode-ide/pull/2126

What I learned from doing this is a similar lesson I have learned when doing other things in LiveCode. You don’t need to go into anything knowing exactly how to do it, or even knowing roughly how to do it. I went into this knowing nothing and if I am being honest I am probably going out of it not knowing that much more. However, it’s incredible what you can do in LiveCode simply by looking at other examples, tweaking them a little bit and seeing if it works. I was able to read through the code in the revmenubar file, understand roughly what it was doing and match that to what I was trying to do. I broke it several times. I went through what seems to be a pretty normal developer cycle of getting one part working, getting the other part working and then realizing the initial part no longer works. I went through this cycle for several evenings sitting with the laptop on my lap and The Tiger King on the TV with no real idea of what was happening, both with the code and with the craziness on the TV.

Eventually, I had a breakthrough – it all started working and the feeling of achieving that was great. I suspect it was a much better feeling than that of starting and finishing painting my fence. I rushed onto Slack to tell Ali and others that I got it working, I was super happy. Ali was quick to point out that he expects there might be a few comments on the PR which I took as a hint that I didn’t quite do things perfectly. I have since discovered for example that my arrange menu item still appears even if no objects are selected, I suspect I need to put some kind of checking in the code to ensure an object is indeed selected. That sounds like a job to tackle during the next episode of The Tiger King. I look forward to it!

Your Coding Challenge

I wrote this blog post not just to show off how bad I am at home chores or how good I am at IDE editing, but instead to talk about the opportunity for you to jump headfirst into your own coding challenges. What is that one project you always planned to do if you ever found a way to create more time in a day? Now could be the time to get that coding challenge started and finished. Maybe it’s a small individual project, maybe you always wanted to start a group project with others in the LiveCode community? Maybe it’s a new app, a widget you always wished existed or maybe you have your own IDE pet peeves. Now could be the time to resolve them. I wanted to end this post with some clever message about being brave enough to walk into the tiger’s cages like Joe Exotic (The Tiger King) and relate that back to jumping in headfirst with your coding challenge but I really can’t think of any good examples to take from that show that would be relatable or appropriate here. Nope. None. Crazy.

I challenge you to start your own coding challenge during this lockdown. I hope you accept. You won’t regret it! If you are struggling to come up with a challenge here are some things that you could get stuck into…

1. Build a comprehensive interactive charts widget for LiveCode (Everyone would love this)
2. Add guides to the IDE so that you can easily see when things are lined up and spaced evenly and objects just snap into place. Similar to those found in Mockup prototyping tools or even in keynote when you are editing (This is one Kevin would LOVE to see)
3. Make a treadmill elevation calculator where the calculation is in a single line of code – (Suggested by our ultra-marathon runner and coder Sophie)
4. Dip your toes into GitHub and contributing to LiveCode – check out the latest post of This Week in LiveCode for some tips on how to do that. (Suggested by Panos)
5. Learn how to code for the first time or help someone else learn to code. See our Covid-19 page for more information on getting started with LiveCode.

Tell us in the comments section what you have always wanted to do in LiveCode but never had the time? Maybe you have already started your own coding challenge, let us know below. Maybe you have some cool challenges for other people to try out, share them below.

Keep safe everyone – let’s get through this!