With the release of LiveCode 9.0 DP 7, the amount you can do with the android API has been significantly increased. Firstly, it is possible to use LiveCode Builder to respond to user events, which essentially allows the Android native control syntax (mobileControlCreate, mobileControlSet etc) to be replaced with draggable widget objects and standard LiveCode syntax. Secondly, it is possible to run services in the background, allowing, for example, background audio on Android.
Over the last month, we’ve been working hard on our next feature release, LiveCode 9.  Today we’re making a new developer preview available, including a powerful new capability for HTML5 development, and a completely rewritten LiveCode Builder virtual machine.
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One of the biggest new features of LiveCode 8 was the Browser Widget. This new control allows any LiveCode application to take advantage of an embedded browser by just dragging and dropping a control onto a card – just like other LiveCode controls. This replaces the previous way you would use an embedded browser in LiveCode – either via revBrowser on Desktop, or mobileControlCreate(“browser”) on Android/iOS. It goes without saying that this widget was implemented using the power of LiveCode Builder!
The new browser widget really does make using an embedded browser so much easier: there’s no cross-platform difference between how you use it; and there’s no need to manage the browser’s lifetime yourself as it works just like a normal engine control (because that is what it is!). We’d like to extend this ease of use to mobile-specific feature which is widely used: the native field control accessible via mobileControlCreate(“input”).
This stretch goal’s proposal is to build a Builder widget which uses a native layer to make it possible to drag-drop native mobile field controls onto your stacks and use them, with exactly the same functionality as currently provided via the mobileControl functions, but in a way much more in keeping with how LiveCode should be.
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You’ve pledged for Foreign Feature Interface and earned a brand new SQLite database library. With less than 48 hrs to go there’s still time to add Audio Recording to the mix! Here is what you need to know about this stretch goal…
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SQLite databases are used ubiquitously in modern applications. Whether they be used as caches for downloaded data (so apps can run offline), as a file format for document editing apps or just for persistent data storage. Indeed, we feel that they are so important that they deserve their own clean, modern, high-level set of functions in LiveCode Script to access directly – rather than going through revDB.
For this Infinite LiveCode stretch goal we propose to:
The LiveCode community is vital to the success of our platform. We want to ensure the community voice is heard loud and clear. To this end, we approached a leading and respected member of the LiveCode community known for his outstanding contributions and for his extremely successful LiveCode built apps.
We asked Trevor DeVore, Director of Technology at ScreenSteps if he would like to interview Kevin & Mark, asking all the questions that he might have as an active LiveCode community member. Trevor kindly agreed and came up with some excellent questions which we are sure will be of interest to a wide audience!
read moreUnless you have been avoiding your mailbox recently you will know that LiveCode 8 has launched with the first iteration of LiveCode widgets written in the LiveCode Builder Language. LiveCode 8 marks the beginning of the new for the LiveCode platform.
Today, LiveCode lets us build powerful applications faster. We have a powerful and productive programming language that is close to the way we speak and think, we have a tool that enables rapid app development, we can deploy apps to all major platforms from one code base. Imagine if we had a thriving extensions EcoSystem with thousands of useful widgets and libraries that you can use in your application without the need to expand your team size or programming ability. As things stand you can open up LiveCode and drag out useful objects, customise them in the Property Inspector and you have a fully functioning object that would have required hand coding in previous versions. This will forever be useful but it does leave you wanting more, more widgets, more functionality, more usefulness, more productivity.
Introducing the Infinite LiveCode campaign.
What does Infinite LiveCode mean to you, as an end user? Suppose you do not yourself feel you have the time, ability or inclination to write new widgets or extensions for the platform, how does it benefit you?
read moreThe engineering team at LiveCode recently published a technical whitepaper on how we’d like to make LiveCode Builder interoperate better with other languages by improving its so-called ‘foreign function interface’.
In this post, I’d like to work through an example of how Infinite LiveCode, once it is funded, might be used to write an extension for an ability the engine does not have: battery status monitoring on iOS.
There are several steps involved in working out how to build an extension which hooks into foreign APIs:
I’ll go through each of these five steps in turn.
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