The Next Generation: Widgets & Themes

by Kevin Miller on July 8, 2014 45 comments

Watch this video to see me demonstrate a first prototype of the Widgets & Themes project. This is one of the most exciting parts of our entire Next-generation project. We’re now at a stage where it is working well enough that I can show you this first version working. This work has been enabled by all the work we’ve done under the hood over the last year or so.

In this video, I show a prototype widget that displays a PDF, the code that makes it work, then explain the potential for using this feature in a variety of ways to extend LiveCode. Finally I give a brief tour of the first early prototype widget editor, which demonstrates how you will be able to create these widgets yourself and install them into the IDE with a single click.

I hope you enjoy the video!

Kevin MillerThe Next Generation: Widgets & Themes

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45 comments

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  • Klaus Major - July 8, 2014 reply

    WOW, luvit! 🙂

  • Sean Cole - July 8, 2014 reply

    Awesome!! This is what I’ve been waiting for. A much better way of creating externals. Yay, Livecode has a future!

  • Devin Asay - July 8, 2014 reply

    Wow, I think the paradigm just shifted!

    LiveCode is poised to become THE environment for quickly gaining access to lower-level OS calls. The whole tech world is becoming our playground. 🙂

  • Andrew Meit - July 8, 2014 reply

    O M G…what I had been wanting and waiting for from ComplieIt some 30 yrs ago!

    Please, please have well written docs for all this coolness…

    You provide open, Swift is Apple’s further gambit to lock in devs. Apple might make it harder to get lc apps into Macs but hope not.

    Please have out of the box, widget for the opentype and typesetting features of the OSs…i.e. Set the letterspacing of line 1 of fld 2 to -1.3 as pts; Get the final form glyphcontexts of font “Hebrewshalom”; Set the final form context of chars -2 to -1 to true.

    Thank you, thank you…my long wait is nearly over….

    Sean Cole - July 9, 2014 reply

    Hi Andrew
    Swift won’t affect LC or our ability to upload Apps. Swift is built on the C foundation as is LC (and most other platforms too including windows, android and so on). So I wouldn’t be too worried. Swift is worth looking into though if you want to expand your skill base. A lot of its principles are very similar to those of LC.

  • Jim Lambert - July 8, 2014 reply

    Externals go internal.
    Internals!

  • Neil Allan - July 8, 2014 reply

    WOW my externals headaches are nearly over! Fantastic work guys, looks awsome!

  • Obleo - July 8, 2014 reply

    Finally something cool from the kickstarter. Almost like xojo now. Can not wait to use it.

  • Mag - July 8, 2014 reply

    I was thinking about an improvement in the external features, but I did not think this would have been true revolution. Well done guys!

  • Dan Shafer - July 8, 2014 reply

    This looks like a VERY powerful addition and a well-architected approach to a sticky problem. The more LC is written in LC, the more portable it becomes. And even if only 10% of LC coders are able to mangle the lower-level code, at least most of us should be able to read and understand what is going on.

    Bravo, Team LC!

  • Paul Richards - July 8, 2014 reply

    Bravo LC BRAVO, a fantastic and very welcomed addition! cannot wait for the release 🙂

  • James Hale - July 8, 2014 reply

    So this is the widgets and themes stretch goal!
    Really blown away.
    Speechless in fact.
    Well done.
    .
    .
    .
    .
    Are we there yet?

  • Mark - July 9, 2014 reply

    Wow, truly innovative. What we were all hoping for. Well done RR.

  • Kyle - July 9, 2014 reply

    This is wonderful news!!! One problem I see, PLEASE UPDATE the API documentation online! It is very outdated and I use that frequently. I saw in this video a “bind” command, but it is not in the API documentation.

    Thank you guys!

    Sean Cole - July 9, 2014 reply

    ‘Bind’ is a new command for low-level access it would seem, hence why there is not yet any docs for it. But I agree that the current docs online could do with a lot of updating. I like to have it open on my iPad for constant reference (as I have a really bad memory and there is no ‘hinting’ in Livecode. Hey, that would be a neat addition at some point!)

  • Mark Hidden - July 9, 2014 reply

    It hard to get people excited about foundations, but they do make for amazing things in the end. I am not to surprised it has taken this long to get to this point. Thanks for the update.

  • Andy Piddock - July 9, 2014 reply

    I was excited about the HTML/JavaScript project and all it’s possibilities…but…WOW! this will make developers who use the so called main stream languages sit up and take a serious look at LiveCode. One of the often heard complaints is how hard it is to hook into the lower level stuff of the OS and API’s of third party vendors, this changes all that.

    Dragging and dropping Widgets onto the tool pallet…been waiting for this ever since I stopped using Delphi.

    A BIG thumbs up and thank you to all of the LiveCode team for this.

  • Dave Kilroy - July 9, 2014 reply

    Most impressive. Congratulations to all involved for a lot of smart working. Feels like LiveCode is moving up another level 🙂

  • Nicolas - July 9, 2014 reply

    Wowww !! RunRev really stands for always RUNning REVolution in coding tools right ?
    That’s really impressive. Well done guys.

  • Christopher Searson - July 9, 2014 reply

    Very Impressive!! Nice work RunRev!

  • Nigel - July 9, 2014 reply

    Sounds Exciting. Looking forward to trying it out.

  • Stephan Sokolow - July 10, 2014 reply

    Nice! This sort of thing is exactly why I backed LiveCode when it showed up on Kickstarter, despite my being unlikely to ever use it.

    My weird brand of semi-obsessive perfectionism recoils at LiveCode’s English-like syntactic verbosity and the trade-offs inherent in this approach to platform abstraction and GUI design, but most people are pragmatic and I firmly believe that we need good, open-source tools so that everyone, no matter how sane or how broke, can learn enough coding to experiment with a simple idea or automate a boring, repetitive task.

    (Leave things like “proper ReSTful web architecture” and “utilities which follow the UNIX way” to nuts like me.)

  • Christopher Armstrong - July 10, 2014 reply

    Looks very promising. Ready to test it once it’s available.

  • Erik Beugelaar - July 20, 2014 reply

    This a huge step forward!

    Recently the discussion about the still missing external library for Android was fired up again and also the suggestion was made that LiveCode was more focused on iOS development then Android.
    To clear up this issue it might be a good idea to demonstrate a widget working both on iOS and Android using different low-level calls.

  • Informatie - July 22, 2014 reply

    As a livecode backer and regular user, this makes easier can use my existing LIB’s

  • Emily jones - August 2, 2014 reply

    Awesome ***** thank you love it keep up the good work !!!

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