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. 

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."

Prepare photo galleries for publication

Himalayan Academy Publications keeps a central folder on its Local Area Network server where content contributors can drop photo sets. They have a LiveCode app called Caption Writer which their editors can use to access these folders. The interface allows for the editor to write captions for each photo, a story for the gallery and then with the click of a button generate all the HTML and JavaScript needed for a Galleria slideshow post. The app automatically opens WordPress on the server with the post sitting on the clipboard ready to go. 

 

Cloud based training management

Phil Davis built a training manager app that is used to create training accounts, generate licensing, track usage, set training account permissions and training features, and manage training titles. All the data it manages is in the cloud. The "cloud" server code is all LiveCode.

Make an interactive classroom seating chart

Cyril Pruszko is a teacher and wrote a Seating Chart App to help keep track of his classes. He explained:

"I can drag and drop students to different seats, tap on seats to take attendance, grade assignments while I walk around the room, print seating charts for substitutes and many other time-saving tasks. I could not imagine doing this very easily in any other language."

Organise the distribution of promotional materials

A division of one of the world's most prestigious watch makers asked Simon Asato to help them streamline their distribution of promotional materials to retailers. They wanted the retail shops to be able to order displays, posters, duratrans etc. from a single source. He used LiveCode to build an app that shows current visual campaigns and allows retailers to place orders either via email or print to pdf. The app runs on multiple devices. This is what it looks like on an iPad.

Make statistics and admin easier

Michael Lew, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology at the University of Melbourne, makes extensive use of LiveCode. That includes making it easier to calculate statistical summaries such as confidence intervals.

 He also uses LiveCode to simplify his administrative tasks.

Michael told me "Without Livecode my job would be harder and my students would think me boring."

Make sure telephone messages get through

A company where Andy Piddock used to work, recorded telephone messages on paper. Sometimes the message didn't get to the correct person or got delayed. In extreme cases this led to losses of possible contracts. So he used LiveCode to produce a client/server application to record all telephone calls and make sure they were seen and actioned by the correct people. 

Reduce and reuse your code

Scott McDonald is the author of a successful markbook application. I'll let him tell the story.

"My desktop markbook software is what I call a major application. Previously it required over 100,000 lines of code in another language that is less powerful than LiveCode. When rewritten in LiveCode it only required 30,000 lines for the same functionality."

"When the clients of my markbook wanted a version that could run in a browser, I did it with LiveCode Server. Using the same language as the desktop version in a web/cloud based app was a huge time saver. It would have taken much longer to develop MarkBook Online if I would have had to rewrite it in PHP or some other server side language."

Keep track of kids at a summer camp

Mark Rauterkus made an attendance application with LiveCode for a Swim &

Water polo Camp. 

Mark explains "We can keep the attendance of 100 kids and staff each day, checking in with a laptop or smart phone. The staff and the application talked with a database a few times each morning and afternoon as we left school, ran to the pool, swam, left the pool, and returned to the school. We had photos of the kids for easier recognition as one problem came as other kids tried to sneak into our activities. Emergency contact info was just a touch away and with smart phones. We kept those in the school office aware of who was where, real time."