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.

21 March 2013

Learn Japanese verbs

A while ago, Alan Stenhouse made a series of apps for learning the many forms of Japanese verbs in LiveCode*. They followed a new learning method created by Paul Knight, a professor of Japanese in New Zealand. The apps provide a number of exercises which can be followed, including audio playback, saving for revision and random ordering, as well as a dictionary and articles illustrating some interesting aspect of Japanese life and culture.


* Alan originally developed the Apps with Hypercard and found it very easy to keep them alive by moving them to LiveCode.

20 March 2013

Build self-contained music samplers

Scott Rossi used LiveCode to build this stand alone music player with integrated slideshow and browser-launching controls.



And this one as well.



19 March 2013

18 March 2013

Teach maths to young kids

Scott Rossi used LiveCode to build the interface and tools for Math Gadget. It teaches maths concepts to elementary (primary) school kids.




17 March 2013

Make a multilingual talking metronome


Alan Stenhouse of Scruff Monkey Software used LiveCode to create BeatSpeak, a multilingual talking metronome for iPhones and iPads.

A simple and elegant digital metronome. It lets you choose the number of beats per bar, adjust the tempo slider or tap along with your favorite song, then hit the big beat number to start or stop.

You can change the language (currently either English or Japanese) as well as the gender of the spoken voice.







15 March 2013

Learn by organising your browsing


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.



14 March 2013

Create an interactive puzzle

Scott Rossi created a series of interactive puzzles for use in alternate reality games in LiveCode. Here is a screenshot of one of them.




13 March 2013

Find where to recharge your electric vehicle

Alan Stenhouse of Scruff Monkey Software built EV-Point, an electric vehicle recharge station finder, for iPads and iPhones with LiveCode.

EV-Point lets you find a place to recharge your electric vehicle. Your location will be indicated, simply select a target recharge station near you and get directions to it, both on the map and as text. You can also email the directions to someone else if required. Directions are automatically localised to your current phone language. Charging stations for Europe, the USA, Australia, Japan and other countries are available.






















12 March 2013

11 March 2013

Develop the World's largest signing dictionary ... a video dictionary at that!

Tiemo Hollmann from Verlag Karin Kestner OHG developed the World's largest sign language dictionary.  It includes a massive 18,000 German words and 18,000 German sign language videos. Easy to access, fast to find, sophisticated to play in slow motion, and handy to print a sign picture.




German speakers can learn more.

10 March 2013

Learn by programming games


Save the bird was written by a 13 year old girl student of Cyril Prusko at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in LiveCode.  It's a cute 3 level game to fly a bird to the finish, collecting cherries for points. You never die, you just get sent back to the start. It took her about 4 weeks. During that period, she also wrote a maze game, an educational game and a few other programs.



Another of Cyril's girl students wrote a spacecraft game. The objective of the game is to collect stars whilst avoiding moving objects. Her original game was a Dr Who game where you flew the Tardis through space. She changed it to a rocket.




09 March 2013

Take and edit screenshots

Paul Hibbert launched a commercial app he developed with LiveCode last year called Little Red Snapper. It was designed to help mobile phone web programmers work with screenshots. The app is available for Windows and Mac and has sold more than 1500 copies.

The main purpose of the app is to allow the user to take snapshots, edit and merge them together, all in a simple interface, but with some powerful commands, so avoiding the need for heavyweight image editing apps like Photoshop.




I'll let Paul add a bit of background. "I should also tell you that I am not a professional programmer, this is the first commercial app I've ever made, so I was amazed at it's success. My previous programming experience came from using Filemaker, HTML and playing around with Basic many years ago on a Spectrum."

08 March 2013

Build a correlation coefficient tutorial

Ronald Zeller built this interactive app in LiveCode so that his students could explore correlation coefficients. It illustrates sample positive, negative and neutral correlations.  When the students select various functions it displays the statistics contributing to the correlation values and a plot of the various data sets with a best-fit line.   Students can drag data points to new locations on the chart and then recalculate the values to observe the effect.  They can also create a new data set of their own and then calculate and plot that data to further explore the principles.  When they are ready they can take an exit quiz which submits performance data via a server-based SQL database. 




Note: The plot points appear larger than normal to allow selecting and dragging on an iPad.

Help a disabled person study Latin

Mac Bennett used LiveCode to write "Latin Scansion Tools" for a disabled Latin student who has difficulty using a pen or pencil. It allows the user to place scansion symbols anywhere on the page, and outputs a pdf file to print or give to the teacher.  

The poems can be easily imported into the app by simply pasting text or an image (jpg  file).





07 March 2013

Build experimental music players



Scott Rossi used LiveCode to build this experimental music player designed to simulate cinematic motion graphics interface.



06 March 2013

Create an interactive mobile product catalogue

Mathhias Rebbe developed a mobile product catalogue iOS app in LiveCode. It is gives the user access to product prices, features and availability. The information can also be sent by email directly from the app.  To make it easy for users, they can simply scan International Article Number(EAN) barcodes with their phone to search for that product in the catalogue.

The user can also establish a phonecall or create an email from within the app to get in contact with sales, financial or technical staff. 









05 March 2013

Manage archaeological digs

Malte Brill's company has developed a rather sophisticated app in LiveCode for archaeologists called archaeoDox. It is the standard excavation software used in the German states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.



04 March 2013

Haunt your house

Scott Rossi built this digital ouija board in LiveCode. It generated random phrases for a haunted house event.




03 March 2013

Add version control to desktop publishing apps

As many as ten different editors at Himalayan Academy Publications may need to read and write files of each of their books and international magazine. They  use Adobe's Indesign for their graphical publications. They used to use Adobe's Version Cue but vendor support was going to cease. Soon they would be left with no version control system. I'll let Brahmanathaswami continue the story.

"I wanted to create a fool proof app that anyone with no training could use, which required virtually no maintenance, and which did not have all the unnecessary bells and whistles that our editors complained they never used and only made life complicated. Using LiveCode's ability to leverage the shell and its fabulous file management tools I created a lean revision control system that simply copies and renames files from the main server on our network to the local version control folders. In two years since we set this up we have never had a single file corruption or loss of data and the overhead in management is virtually zero. Livecode makes this possible."



02 March 2013

Simulate a lift (elevator)

Graham Samuel used LiveCode to write a simple simulator of a lift (elevator) in a department store as part of project for showing UK school children how simple computing devices are used for sequencing and interaction. The user (a pupil) can 'program' the lift to stop at particular floors, make announcements etc. The program provides 'passengers' with randomised intentions for getting in and out of the lift. If the sequencing is wrong, passengers can be left behind or trapped in the lift - they even make grumbling noises when things go wrong!


01 March 2013

Add intelligence to your ERP system

The French inks manufacturer, Encre Dubuit, used LiveCode to develop an intelligent front-end to its ERP system for sales administration. It allows staff to easily enter customer orders and is linked in real time to the ERP. So for example, new orders are immediately reflected in the ERP system. The stock levels held in the ERP system are continuously available in the sales administration system.