In my last blog I discussed how much fun it can be for kids to work with LiveCode, but have you ever thought about how much fun it is for adults too? And I am not taking about writing code. LiveCode is so versatile that you can also do other things with it. In particular, I have come across two other interesting applications for which people use LiveCode:

1. An Image Editor/Drawing Tool

Yes, I have found that LiveCode is being used as a drawing and image editing tool, and you can literally draw to your heart’s content.

Used as a Drawing Tool

You can drag and drop controls onto a card and update a range of graphics and blending effects through the property inspector of the particular objects.

You can import images by selecting “File > Import As Control > Image File…” and then use the controls in the bottom half of the tools pallet to update and alter the image.
Now you may think the magnifying glass is missing from the tools, but don’t despair, LiveCode has one of these handy little gizmos too. You can zoom into a region of the image with a drawing tool that you want to apply to the image: Select a drawing tool and press cmd+Mouse Button on Mac or Ctrl+Mouse Button on Windows over the area you want to edit and a new window opens in which you can update the enlarged pixel area.

Once you have finished updating your image, you can save it with a command like:

export snapshot from image “YOUR IMAGE NAME” to file “MY-IMAGE.png” as PNG

or something similar if you want to export a capture of some other control or even the entire card.

2. A Presentation Editor

Building on the use of LiveCode as an Editor/Drawing Tool, a logical extension is the creation of presentations.

LiveCode as a Presentation tool

Admittedly this does require a bit of coding in order to navigate between cards, but this is relatively trivial, and of course LiveCode has a large range of visual effects that you can use when transitioning between slides.

The nice thing about slides written in LiveCode is that you are not bound to the particular device you created the presentation on. You can transfer the presentation to other hardware architectures and operating systems.

Any Other Ideas?

 If you can think of anything else that LiveCode could be used for, other than programming of course, then I would love to hear from you.