LiveCode 8 introduced the segmented control widget.  This very versatile widget can be used in several user interface roles, and this blog post shows you how to use it to align text in a field and to create a 5-star rating control.
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LiveCode Widgets: More Line Chart Madness
by Monte Goulding on November 2, 2016 No commentsContinuing on from my last blog post where I added the showLines and markerStyles property to the line chart and not being one to know when to stop I realised that what the line chart really needs now is more marker styles. I could come up with some more styles and draw them but that’s not as much fun as what I’m going to do. What I’m going to do is allow you to specify one of the 6 marker styles already implemented and also any icon name from the svg library. We can have beautiful charts with little smiley faces as markers!
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LiveCode Widgets: Modifying the Line Chart
by Monte Goulding on September 15, 2016 2 commentsLast week we looked at how to use the Line Chart Widget. This week I am going to show you how to modify this widget. I have included a link to the code on GitHub at the end of this blog post.
Having spent most of my time lately immersed in mergExt externals, the LiveCode engine and the IDE, I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to delve into LiveCode Builder and Widgets. Until now…
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LiveCode Widgets: The Line Chart
by Monte Goulding on September 7, 2016 28 commentsThere’s nothing quite like a good chart for presenting data in a way that is easy for people to quickly understand. A few of us around the office even get strangely excited by chart bling so it’s no surprise that the Line Chart was high on the agenda for LiveCode 8. For someone like me that has spent many hours implementing charts in LiveCode over the years having a chart right there in the tool palette to drag onto my stack is just lovely.
read moreFaff-free files function
by Peter Brett on July 13, 2016 No commentsThe next developer preview release of LiveCode 8.1 will contain a long-requested enhancement to make writing programs that work with files much easier.
For time immemorial, the files() and folders() functions in LiveCode Script have operated only on the current folder (also known as the current working directory), which is accessed using the defaultFolder global property.
Unfortunately, setting the defaultFolder can fail for many reasons.  For example, it might fail if the requested directory doesn’t actually exist, or if you don’t have permissions to read it.  A reasonably robust implementation of a ListStackFilesInFolder() function that lists the stack files in directory might look something like this:
read moreCross-platform app deployment with LiveCode is now even easier!
by Ali Lloyd on June 16, 2016 3 commentsWhile the majority of LiveCode features are built-in to the language, there are increasing numbers of ways to extend LiveCode, some of which require the inclusion of native code modules and other resources. The long-term vision for the IDE is to provide an extensions ecosystem, where script libraries, plugins, LiveCode Builder widgets, libraries and modules, custom controls and old-style externals can be easily downloaded and installed, and if required, subsequently built into standalone applications.
One important step towards this was the implementation of a dynamic property inspector, so that widgets and custom controls could have a way of specifying their editable properties and how they can be edited. Up until now the standalone settings stack has suffered some of the limitations of the old property inspector – namely that adding features requires manual modification of a stackfile.
An ‘Inclusions’ pane has been added to the LiveCode standalone settings user interface for the 8.1 releases, which not only simplifies the way you choose what extra functionality you want in your apps, but also allows you to select from a complete list of available inclusions, with a clear indication of the supported platforms at the side.
This significantly improves the cross-platform development experience provided by LiveCode. The iOS and Android panes no longer have separate check boxes for the various built-in externals (such as the XML external). Moreover any resources added to the appropriate locations should be reflected in the list.
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LiveCode Widgets: SVG Path
by Ali Lloyd on June 10, 2016 No commentsContinuing the blog series on the initial set of widgets included with LiveCode 8.0, here we are going to look at the SVG Path widget in a bit more detail.
What is SVG?
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. An SVG image file is essentially a set of instructions about how it should be drawn. SVG paths are sequences of commands which specify how the path is constructed from co-ordinate to co-ordinate (see the specification for SVG paths). This is how the scalability of SVG images is achieved – in order to scale it one simply has to adjust the scale used by the canvas. The SVG path widget only deals with the ‘path’ element of an SVG image. A prototype of full SVG rendering capabilities has been written, however there is a lot to do before SVG can be fully integrated into the engine so that SVG images can be used for button icons and so on.
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Extending the interactive welcome BMI app with HealthKit
by Monte Goulding on June 2, 2016 2 commentsBy now many of you will have completed the new interactive tutorial for LiveCode 8. If you haven’t done that yet, you might like to go and complete it before continuing on here.
By the end of the tutorial you should have an app that looks something like the image below. If you’re like me and get excited by pancake printers it’s probably telling you something different to the image below but let’s not worry about that just now… the point is you should have an app that uses a web service to calculate BMI and charts it.
Today I’m introducing a new external for HealthKit called mergHK. With mergHK you can read and write to the HealthStore and therefore improve the integration of your health app with the array of other apps that users use to manage their health data.
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