28 September 2013

Give the Power to Arrest

This electronic version of the training course "Power to Arrest" from the Department of Consumer Affairs of the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services of the State of California was created using LiveCode by Alejandro Tejada Capellan for Franco Security Consulting Group.



This training course provides the minimum standards of instruction for security personnel. It is a self-instructional course designed to educate the trainee to carry out his or her duties with caution and within the confines of law.



Completing successfully this course is necessary to obtain the Security Guard's Registration Card, required for a person to serve the functions of a security guard or patrol person. This course is intended to be a learning experience as well as a guide to understanding.


24 August 2013

Help people learn French

Alain Vézina set up a small language learning centre for adults more than 20 years ago. At that time, he looked for activities on computer to help students and didn't find much. So he started computing to create the kind of apps of which he dreamt. He started with HyperCard, continued with SuperCard and for several years used LiveCode.


One of those apps he developed in LiveCode is named A-mots-couverts. It is a new type of language game, a kind of crisscross puzzle in varied, interesting texts. The user consolidates and enhances their knowledge and abilities in all aspects of French. There are numerous skills, abilities and knowledge put to the test: listening ability, memorising, reading, text analysis (main idea, secondary ideas), usual spelling, grammatical spelling, syntax, vocabulary, synonyms, antonyms, words of the same family, conjugation, tense conformance, phrases and expressions. It stirs up the user’s interest in learning French in all its forms: oral, read and written. There are three difficulty levels and at the highest difficulty level, challenges are issued to the strongest students.



"It is extremely educational. It's very addictive. I love it" according to Delia Dyer, one of Alain's students.

A-mots-couvert is available for Mac, Windows and iPad. Learn more about A-mots-couvert

It's in both the iOS AppStore and the Mac AppStore.

08 July 2013

Develop an interactive electronic textbook

Devin Asay has been teaching introductory programming to college students using LiveCode for over ten years. There was no textbook available, and he felt that static web pages were ineffective, so he created an interactive "electronic textbook", in LiveCode of course, for his students that teaches the fundamentals of programming and the LiveCode environment. It features interactive examples in each lesson, self-scoring quizzes to check comprehension, downloadable example stacks, an assignment download and upload feature, user progress tracking, and more. Students love this innovative learning tool, and teachers love the way it helps them give feedback and track students' progress.





05 July 2013

Convert MediaWiki XML to HTML

Pascal Lehner wrote an App to convert MediaWiki XML to HTML. It translates the XML exported from MediaWiki to single externally available HTML pages. These HTML pages can then be easily displayed on a website.


Pascal modestly told me "Even though I am a new developer, it took me just a few days to write and debug it."


Note: Whilst the UI is in German, the code is commented in English.

26 June 2013

Help People Keep Safe at Sea

Adam Hyde is a volunteer member of Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue (RCM-SAR), a non-profit organisation providing marine search and rescue off the coasts of British Columbia, Canada. He had the idea for an App that would help distressed amateur sailors to know what to do in most emergency situations. He didn't have any programming experience and couldn't afford to get somebody else to write the App.

He couldn't realise his dream until he came across LiveCode. I'll let Adam tell the rest of the story:

"The App was approved first time by Apple thanks to LiveCode. Even more amazing was that I essentially had a working first version in less than two months, working part-time with no prior programming experience. I spent the next three months dealing with legal and content issues which held up the release. During that time I just kept improving things."

"We truly believe that our App will help save lives.  All the information is there for a distressed boater to know what to do in most emergency situations and have that information right on the phone they have in their pocket."



Take a look at Adam's App.

02 June 2013

Code an App store accepted game in a week


Dave Probert wrote a complete iPad game (from idea to App store submission) in just a week using Livecode.  The actual approval process took longer than the time it took to write the code!

The game is HexThello - a 2 player boardgame based on the 'Reversi/Othello' type of rules, but using a hexagonal grid instead of the usual squares.  This gives it an added extra two directions of action and requires a little more thought during play.  The game has three modes: two player, one player, and even no player - the program plays itself.




Dave explained "LiveCode provides a medium that was quick to produce a prototype of the game, and then to enhance and develop the final working product in just a few days.  The cleaning up and testing was another couple of days.  For the most part it was quite a painless process.  For anyone out there who is looking at creating a 2D game and wants a lot of control over the precise action, then Livecode is a good solution."

It's in the AppStore.

17 May 2013

Help people express their feelings.

Phil Jimmieson wrote In My Shoes in LiveCode. It is a computer package for Macintosh and Windows computers that helps professionals communicate with children and learning disabled adults about their experiences, views, wishes and feelings, including potentially distressing experiences such as illness and abuse in home, educational and other settings. The interviewer sits alongside the child and assists, guides and interacts with them through a structured interview process. Trainees learn how to use the In My Shoes computer-package and structured interview approach, as well as building on their skills in communicating with children. In My Shoes has a sound research base and has been sponsored by the Department of Health/DfES and others. It is useful for psychologists, social workers, child psychiatrists, other mental health staff, health workers, educational workers and specialists in forensic services.







24 April 2013

23 April 2013

Spend time with your patients not entering data

Peter M Brigham, a psychiatrist, used LiveCode to reduce the time he spent entering data into a web-based system and, as a result, spend more time concentrating on his patients.

I'll let Peter tell his story. "Our group practice recently had to change to an electronic medical record and I had to stop using the LiveCode-based practice management tool I had been developing and using for 20 years. The new software is web-based, and extremely cumbersome and frustrating. I put together a little utility to facilitate writing notes that is being used especially by the other psychiatrists and prescribers in the practice. It allows storage and easy access to snippets of text, and provides a shortcut for writing certain prescriptions. It took me under 2 hours in LiveCode to get the basic functionality written, and then another few hours to clean up the interface, handle details like text fonts and opening and closing routines, and write a help text. It then took 5 minutes to turn it into a standalone for Windows and post it for others to use. I had it done before the end of the first week the new software was rolled out."


"This illustrates one of the unmatchable virtues of LiveCode — a 'non-programmer' can rapidly create a custom piece of software tailored to the exact needs of the user, since the non-programmer is the user."




21 April 2013

Teach the fundamentals of electronics

Basic Electronics Stage 1 was written by Geoff and Dave Probert in LiveCode for both iPads and Androids. 

It aims to teach the fundamentals of electricity and electronics to anyone starting on the exciting path to Technology. It is just the first in a series of apps to be written over the next couple of years.  In fact Stage 2 is currently in preparation, targeted for release in June.

The texts are written in English and in Thai, with simple switching between the two languages.




Find out more.

20 April 2013

Teaching Law

David Johnson has been using LiveCode to develop legal learning games for use by law students at New York Law School.


19 April 2013

Make an art app for kids

When John Lally, a professional 3D animator, wanted to try his hand at app development, he found himself searching for a development environment that would be simultaneously intuitive, flexible, and robust. Although he had some scripting experience from building animation rigs, he did not have experience with Apple's Xcode. He found LiveCode to be the perfect blend of easy to use drag-and-drop UI elements and expansive scripting environment that could accommodate the complex hybrid solutions that his app required. The result was "Macaroni Art", recently released on Amazon for the Kindle Tablet Series, and on iTunes as a Universal iOS app.



You can get it from the AppStore and Amazon.

17 April 2013

Develop a web aggregator

Scott McDonald developed the LiveCode Super Site to simplify finding the latest questions and answers about LiveCode. He was able to quickly write a simple "screen scraping" stack on his Windows 7 laptop that gets information from the web from Stack Overflow, Use-LiveCode mailing list and the RunRev Forums. He then turned it into a standalone application, built for OS X, and runs it on his Mac Mini media server. After processing the data every hour (which is straightforward with the string processing capabilities built into LiveCode), his app uploads the refreshed html pages via ftp to the server hosting the site. Scott enters the blog entries by hand, but said "if the number of LiveCode related blogs increases I will automate that part too!"

16 April 2013

Learn the Cyrillic alphabet

Devin Asay used LiveCode to build his first iOS app. Drawing on his academic background in Russian, Devon created a Cyrillic alphabet tutor for iPad. It includes letter cards for each letter, knowledge checks and games to help the user test visual recognition of the letters.

15 April 2013

Create icons

Jan Schenkel developed IconBadger using LiveCode is an in-house utility for his colleague user experience designers. The company had purchased a large set of icons, but they were still missing some for their flagship application. Thanks to Jan's tool, they can now quickly create additional icons by combining database 'table' icons and function 'badge' symbols.


14 April 2013

Simulate intra-galatic radio waves

Roger Quay developed SETIsyncProb in LiveCode for the iPad. It is an accurate visual simulation of the synchronicity problem that exists when intelligent civilisations try to detect one another. Roger donated his app to the SETI Institute so that all proceeds go to them.









13 April 2013

Build a complete chat system


ChatRev is a server/client chat system, similar to IRC (but much simpler), developed in LiveCode. It was made almost ten years ago by Björnke von Gierke as a proof of concept. Since then he updated it regularly and it is still used daily by him and a few other people to chat about LiveCode and the world.



11 April 2013

Graph production data straight from a database

Roger Eller uses LiveCode and Charts Engine* to produce production graphs such as this directly from a database:


* Charts Engine is a LiveCode Library from Björnke von Gierke. It is currently available from the RunRev Marketplace

10 April 2013

Create QR Codes

John Craig uses LiveCode to directly generate QR codes.


More information.


Note: The displayed image includes the text "1001 things to do with LiveCode".

09 April 2013

Build mobile games

Andre Garzia wrote a couple of simple mobile games for an upcoming book on developing mobile games with LiveCode.


08 April 2013

Manage a database of images

Roger Eller used LiveCode to develop this app which to manage images via an SQL database for a large print company.



Some areas of the screen shot have been obscured to maintain privacy.

07 April 2013

06 April 2013

Manage web site media resources

Andre Garcia used LiveCode to develop a desktop app to allow a Hindu monastery to manage the media resources for their web site.


03 April 2013

Build a full blown graphic quality control tool

Roger Eller built this fully blown Graphics QC tool in LiveCode. It is used for checking computer prepared artwork prior to large-scale print runs.


Parts of the image have been obscured to maintain confidentiality.

02 April 2013

Develop a child and family training assessment tool

This Much! is interactive visual analogue scale software developed by Phil Jimmieson in LiveCode for iPads. Invaluable for paediatric nurses, child therapists, school counsellors, psychologists and psychotherapists, it generates both quantitative data and qualitative information, using a combination of graphics, text, symbols and images (including photographs). It can be very quickly adapted to explore and quantify almost any symptom or facet of experience.

It allows children and adults with intellectual disabilities to generate and manipulate graphic representation on a scale customised to his or her particular needs. Ratings can be made using figures representing people, any digital image or any text label. The scale can be easily adapted and enhanced with icons to aid understanding.







Build a tiny web server

Andre Garcia used LiveCode to build a tiny web server. It serves both static files and LiveCode CGIs. It isn't meant to replace a full-blown web server but has proved useful for many specific tasks like issuing serial numbers via email and monitoring the status of remote computers.





31 March 2013

Teach calculus

A now retired City Colleges of Chicago Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, A. N. DiVito, Ph.D, developed PointPlots in LiveCode. It's a pedagogical program for teaching pre-calculus through Calculus II mathematics (polygons, relations, functions, curve sketching, inverse function theory, polar coordinates, parametric equations, secant and tangent lines, Taylor Series, arbitrary and regular Riemann Sums, etc.).


30 March 2013

Help remote communities create and share stories

Alex Shaw, art gallery director and technology advocate, collaborated with isee-ilearn to create a tool in LiveCode to allow remote communities in Central Australia to develop and share stories for a central repository called italklibrary. Stories are now being created all over the world in various languages to deliver important social messages and engage a younger generation with technology.







29 March 2013

Create tools to improve department efficiency

Roger Eller created a toolbar simply named "Toolz". He loaded it up with various LiveCode apps which he built to help his colleagues automate tasks which could result in typos, like renaming files.  One of his Toolz allowed them to overlay a transparent protractor on top of artwork to verify printing angle specifications. Using LiveCode, he was able to make Toolz that really helped his department get stuff done, both correctly and with increased efficiency.



28 March 2013

Bring your user interfaces to life

A few years ago Scott Rossi created an impressive video of his work. Scott creates images with graphic design apps and then brings them to life with LiveCode. So when you see one of Scott's UIs working in the video it is all down to LiveCode.


The credits mention Runtime Revolution, it is the former name of LiveCode.

27 March 2013

Help a non-programmer create a kiosk app


Roger Eller told me the story of how, with the assistance of LiveCode, he helped a colleague who had no programming experience create a touch screen kiosk application. I'll let Roger relate the story.

"In 2001, I assisted a colleague who had only an idea. We set out to make a prototype of his idea for a touch-screen based kiosk for tracking printing plate materials. My friend had zero programming background, but was able to design his interface (from his idea) using an early version of LiveCode. Then we sat down and scripted the buttons and choices to make it functional."



"When the idea was proven (around 2002 I think), he built the final version mostly by himself, with some scripting advice from myself. We found a touch-screen monitor with Windows drivers, and delivered a touch screen kiosk system that is still in use today (12 years later). Go LiveCode!!!!"


Note: Some parts of the screenshot have been obscured on purpose to protect sensitive data.


26 March 2013

Build a mobile trivia game

Alistair Campbell organised a trivia party with some friends. He wanted a different way to organise the questions so decided to write his own app in LiveCode. I'll let him tell the story:

"The most interesting thing for me was that in that day of LiveCoding I decided that this really needed to be delivered as a mobile app. I had not used LiveCode for mobile development before so I thought this might be a really big ask. In fact, it was incredibly easy. So, right now, I have a working Android app that sits on my phone."




25 March 2013

Build an assembly language interpreter

When Andre Garzia was taking the “Computer Architecture 101” class of his Computer Science degree, he had to submit assignments in assembly language. The university used a tweaked assembly language interpreter that was x86 like. It was an educational interpreter made for D.O.S. It wouldn't run on his Macbook Pro.
So he decided to build his own assembly language interpreter with LiveCode. It needed to mimic the one used by the university and he decided to only implement the minimum code needed to run the examples from the course text book. In less than a day, Andre had the app running. It could execute assembly programs line by line which is a boon for learning.



24 March 2013

Learn by developing an advanced calculator

This is advanced calculator was created in LiveCode by a 16 year old boy student of Cyril Prusko at Eleanor Roosevelt High School. It has an on/off switch, paper tape and advanced features. 




22 March 2013

Map Peptides

Professor Rob Beynon, a Royal Society Industrial Fellow, who works at the Institute of Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool regularly turns to LiveCode. He mostly uses it to hack small, local solutions to process large datasets. He also write useful tools for his research group including the very simple*, yet useful, Peptide Mapper in LiveCode. It uses some biological data to create an SVG visualisation. 



* Very simple in his terms, nowhere near simple to me.