My LiveCode Journey

I first started to use LiveCode around 10 years ago, when I was looking for a development platform to build an app to accompany my own Imperium Latin Course (www.imperiumlatin.com). Previous to this, I had been using Adobe (previously Macromedia) Director, which did not offer the possibility of authoring for iOS or Android devices.

Early software creations

The resulting software I created, Imperium Word Tools, was about 12 months in development and offers an exploration of Latin words which I had never been able to build before, allowing students to see word forms inside their full systems. Since Latin words change their endings and have many different permutations, this represented a huge move forward. Details of the app can be seen here.

I have built quite a few different apps in LiveCode in the intervening years (Imperium Unseen Tools, Aeneas 4, The Horace Trail 3) which have a presence on various app stores and are also offered from links from my website. However, recent work has taken me away from App Store submissions towards other areas, including supporting my work at home as a writer and publisher of puzzle books. Amongst these are various books of Yorkshire Puzzles, as well as Latin ones and even Ancient Greek ones (unique in the world).

LiveCode for Puzzle Masters

My use of LiveCode in assisting these projects has been realised by the creation of sorting software which allows me to specify how many letters there should be in each word and where certain letters should appear. This is for my own personal use but speeds up the work of creating crossword grids by a huge factor, once I have built the appropriate databases. I was working for a while as puzzle master for the Dalesman and Cumbria magazines when I created special sets of these for each magazine as well as a set for making Nostalgia puzzles, which later helped me to create a special book of these.

Interactive displays for award winning James Herriot museum

Some of the most exciting work I am currently doing is for the World of James Herriot, a multi-award winning visitor attraction in Thirsk, North Yorkshire. In the last few years I have been working to create new resources and there are now six of my touchscreen displays deployed at the centre to collect data as well as to occupy and amuse visitors. These include an interactive map for visitors to click on as they enter the surgery of the world’s most famous vet. This acts as a survey to collect data about where in the world the visitors come from and in addition, there are five different touchscreen activities installed as permanent displays in the interactive gallery itself.

The activities include an animals game, a set of jigsaws and a memory game for younger visitors, an activity based on the Channel 5 series, The Yorkshire Vet, and another one based on the internationally successful Channel 5 series, All Creatures Great and Small. For these last we have the support and permission of the television companies to use screenshots, artwork and logos from the productions themselves.

LiveCode lends itself superbly well to the work I am doing, as so much of it relates to words and how they are used. Simple referencing of lists and concatenation techniques offered by the platform are the best possible devices I could have at my disposal to create short, relatively simple pieces of software designed to occupy visitors for a couple of minutes in a setting such as this one. The key thing is that last constraint: too much time and the centre gets clogged; too little and the visitor leaves unsatisfied. The formula seems to work, as the World of James Herriot is in the top 10% of Trip Advisor destinations worldwide! I am very proud to play my part in this success, as will be obvious.

The future

Regarding future work I may or may not do with the platform, I will be happy to talk with any museums or galleries about creating similar products to the ones I mention here. I will carry on setting puzzles (including ones in Latin for The Times newspaper) and I will, I hope, continue to enjoy programming with LiveCode.

Questions or comments? Please email me!