Co-ordinating Timezones

Pat M, known as 7Leven, is an intern at a company called ThoughtSTEM LLC in California. ThoughtSTEM is a company that for a while taught kids to program in the San Francisco area. They would use innovative and fun methods to teach the kids like helping them Mod in Minecraft. Currently, they are developing a video game by the name of CodeSpells. In the game the user, a wizard, uses code to make all their spells.

Pat helps run the forums, run contests for the forum users, and relays information to and from the users. There is also a monthly update where the users can talk to the developers over a live streaming service. 

There are many users from many different locations around the US and other countries. So keeping up with the time zones is difficult. As a result, he made an application with LiveCode that always has the correct timezone that correlates to the developers location. This application also counts down to the the time for the update livestream the application and opens the livestream in the user's default browser. 

The app connects to a MySQL database and gets the time of the update each month from that database. Pat created a second application that updates the database to which the users' applications connect. 

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."

Get it here.

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

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."

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!"

The LiveCode Super Site.

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.

You can join the discussion or just look at the code by downloading it.

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.

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.

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.

Learn more about this wonderful project.

Learn by organising your browsing

A student of Cyril Prusko at Eleanor Roosevelt High School wanted to easily access his favourite websites. He built this little app in LiveCode so that with a single click the website would be automatically opened in his browser.

Make news aggregation easy

Hindu Press International is a popular blog which aggregates key news items. The editors have been provided with a very lean, simple desk top app written in LiveCode.  It helps them get their job done without having to know anything about HTML, FTP or other web technologies. They simply enter stories into a single field and the application parses the stories, generates the blog post, and pushes the post to the web server where it's instantly on line.

Get work, track work, bill work ... on the go

Andy Piddock is working on an Android Quotation, Job tracking, Invoicing and Reporting app. Written in LiveCode, it syncs to an online MySQL database and has a web based admin panel for employers to push jobs to their workers out in the field. 

Develop and run your corporate web site

Encres Dubuit is a French ink manufacturer listed on the Paris stock exchange. They developed their website in LiveCode to run under LiveCode server.

Encres Dubuit

Make it easy for your clients to send you files

Andy Piddock's client wanted an easy way for their customers to send large files  to them. He developed a custom FTP client application using LiveCode for them. The users can simply drag & drop the files onto the app and, with one click, upload them to Andy's customer's server. Andy built-in the necessary measures to secure the application. The application even sends his customer an email once it has sent the files to the server.

Build a training content development and delivery system

Phil Davis built a complete training content development and delivery system in LiveCode for a client. The "Builder" app is used to create interactive training in any of several human languages with text, movies, images and audio.

The training content is delivered through a desktop training app for people who may not have an internet connection.

The content can be delivered through the browser to people who have an internet connection.

Phil commented "There is no way on earth my client could have afforded to fund the development of this system were it not for LiveCode!" 

Keep up-to-date with the weather

Jacqueline Landman Gay wanted to know get continuous updates on the weather so she wrote a LiveCode app that she could leave running on her desktop. The app lets her set the maps she wants to see and the time between updates.

Jacqueline continues "I wrote this before you could get internet weather everywhere you went. I remember leaving it running during a terrible thunderstorm one time, updating every five minutes and watching the deluge roll in."

Plan your journeys

John Dixon uses LiveCode to drive Google maps to get directions and calculate distances from A to B.

Get Word documents easily into Joomla

Scott McDonald maintains a website that gets contributions in the form of MS Word Documents. Pasting the text direct from Word into Joomla never works. There are just too many unnecessary HTML tags in the Word document. The resulting web pages are ugly. So he wrote a Convert Word utility that leaves in only the tags needed. It was quick and easy for him to develop in LiveCode.

Get real time currency exchange rates

John Dixon developed MoneyXchange, a no-nonsense currency convertor that has instant live access to 94 of the world's currencies ... handy for both the tourist and business traveller.

Write a 'bot' to help you play online games

David Williams wrote a LiveCode server script which is used to implement a Minecraft server bot without altering the game files themselves. It can track the game whilst he's doing something else and gives him hints on what actions to take.

Check your websites are available

Andy Piddock quickly developed a simple real time website monitor in LiveCode.

His monitor checks the sites at a selectable rate of between 1 and 30 minutes.

(The name and addresses of the sites have been purposely blanked out.)