Imagine something simple . . .

All sorts of amusements and nonsense unrelated to xTalk
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richmond62
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Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

Imagine LiveCode Community 9.6.3 like this:

1. Its functionality has not been changed at all: nothing added, nothing taken away.

2. Its GUI has not been changed: nothing added, nothing taken away.

3. Totally rebranded: new name, new icon, new logo.

Might that not be the first step, rather than discussing all sorts of changes and extras.

Not that I have anything against changes and extras as such, but might they not be, just
at present, a distraction from a simpler, initial step?
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

We definately do need to get those rebrandned binaries out so we can stop mentioning the old thing.

Not that it really makes a difference to be honest.
The people who want to build apps can do it without downloading anything, and the people who want to program are going to chase standards that get them jobs or fulfills their dream of making games before spending hours learning something obscure that does neither.

I think we should get rayLib in there first, then at least we can tell people who want to make games or use advanced graphics to display their data that this is an option

Godot, Blender , Defold and Phaser game engines got a split of $300,000 yesterday so they could prepare for web 3.0

We won't get nothing for a 20th century desktop paradigm.
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richmond62
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

We won't get nothing for a 20th century desktop paradigm.
Sadly, you probably won't, and "any one" (cough, cough) who is banking on that bankrolling their commercial development
has probably had it as well: and developing a way to deploy stuff constructed on a desktop paradigm to HTML might
be either missing the point, or too little too late.

AND, from a totally selfish point of view, I can teach the rudiments of programming with either BBC BASIC (1981) or
"any old" community version of LiveCode that will run any crappy old hardware I choose to use.

Or, for that matter, Python (which seems to be flavour of the month in England and Scotland); which I found, a "quick-n-dirty"
free, online course can get me up to sufficient speed to lift "blobs" of 9-12 off the ground in 2 weeks flat.

So, the question has to be: Why bother?

And, unless there are obvious, pressing reasons, it might be time to go home and dig out that board game your
Granny gave you 35 years ago and see if it really is as bad as you thought it was then.

And if that makes me seem a totally "wet blanket", well so be it, but someone probably had to say it sooner or later.

Having stated what I stated above, I do NOT believe the "desktop paradigm" is dead, or even dying, any more than printed books are dead or
dying (c.f. the odd rebirth of the gramophone record), and, while many, many people may be moving towards web-based apps to get
jobs done, there is still a lot of room, and a lot of mileage to be had out of programming apps to sit on individual desktop
computers.

I also believe that LiveCode 8 - 9 already offer a very large amount of what is needed to develop desktop apps

OK: let's see what I think is missing:

1. Audio and Video is a big mess (especially cross-platform, and 100% on Linux).
2. Built-in web browser on Linux.

So . . . Um . . . de-brand the thing AND, this is where things get awkward, erm, what about an ARM engine?
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

richmond62 wrote: Sat Nov 13, 2021 5:22 pm Might that not be the first step, rather than discussing all sorts of changes and extras.

Not that I have anything against changes and extras as such, but might they not be, just
at present, a distraction from a simpler, initial step?
It's not that I'm making a lot of changes just for the sake of making them (a couple maybe).
What I'm doing is slowly dissecting the IDE while de/rebranding it, and trying to document interesting handlers I find along the way, if for no other reason then so those handlers don't get lost if the stack they're in is removed or substituted at some point. This process has been having a side effect of giving me some big ideas about how it could be a much better IDE to work with. For example, for the first time in a long time I'm using this a bit like a Page Layout program, but then I'm finding myself using trying to use Page Layout key commands that don't do what I expect them to do (which is what those keys would do in Adobe Indesign). For example, Command+Shift+C (Control+Shift+C on Win/Lin) doesn't center text or a shape in a window like it does in a lot of apps (not just Indesign), it brings up the Card Script for Editing instead! That's the type of minor things I'm changing along the way. The goal still is that first initial step of detaching from the old thing.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

richmond62 wrote: Sun Nov 14, 2021 5:57 pm So, the question has to be: Why bother?
Well I know why I'm bothering, because I want to.
If I could find an IDE that more closely matches the way I think a development environment should be, and/or a programming language that matches the way I think of coding something (in English pseudo-code), I’d already be using that language!

And I do look at and have used some other languages. Lately I’m constantly looking for something else that’s at least xTalk-ish and can do the things I want to do. The closest thing I've ever found is probably AppleScript + AppleScriptObjC + Interface Builder, but that runs on Apple products only, and it’s not even all that well supported by Apple anymore.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

xAction wrote: Sat Nov 13, 2021 11:00 pm Godot, Blender , Defold and Phaser game engines got a split of $300,000 yesterday so they could prepare for web 3.0

We won't get nothing for a 20th century desktop paradigm.
I'm pretty sure the Blender isn't a web app, at least not yet.

I'm really not interested in getting rich from working on OXT.
If I that's what I wanted, I'd have a commercial LC license and would be pumping out any old crap app I could think of with it until I made something that happens to sell well.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

It's not about getting rich, it's about getting the funding to pay people to get some work done, write tutorials, documentation.

Nobody is getting rich at Blender, but they have beenpaying people to develop it for 20 years.

It went from this
Blender1999.png
Blender1999.png (65.5 KiB) Viewed 5390 times
To this

Apple is now funding Blender development joining many big names
I was telling people at Apple to do that 20 years ago and wondered why they didn't just turn it into the Final Cut Pro of 3D. I do all my video editing in Blender. The guy I was talking to about Blender left Apple for Xbox.

You can track their growth here in nice charts.
I'm pretty sure the Blender isn't a web app, at least not yet.
The more you know
Blend4Web CE is a free and fully-featured solution which allows you to create open source 3D web applications.
The whole point of giving the blender game engine people $100,000, from just one source, was to get them ready for web 3.0 so the people who gave them money could make even more money.

Godot went from a scrap of source code in 2014, to 12% of the independent game development market in 6 years.
See how long you can scroll on youtube before you run out of godot tutorials MILLIONS of views.

In 2021 the global game development market is worth $180 Billion.
That's jobs, food on the table, taxes, for funding education, paving roads, free vaccines.
That's money for developers to develop things people can use and reuse for decades instead of buying plastic garbage to fill their empty suburban lives.

The only reason OpenXTalk exists is because Livecode failed to gain support.
What's going to exist if we fail to gain support?
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

We won't get nothing for a 20th century desktop paradigm.
Funnily enough . . . a lot of people who program computers were born in the 20th century and are completely
comfortable with 20th century paradigms.

Last year I taught LiveCode online to adults from the Philippines, Haiti, Bulgaria and Germany (and you can make as many
irrelevant comments about the levels of crap in the first 3 of those countries you want - the people paid me money to learn
LiveCode): not once did anyone make any comment about the IDE, nor, for that matter, did they ask me about authoring
stuff for mobile platforms. All of them wanted to learn the elements of LiveCode to leverage it to make desktop stuff to
serve their needs.

While upgrading and updating has its place, it should not have to happen just because . . .

Explaining to children a simple way to plot a circle on a screen can be done effectively on a BBC Model B (1981),
and I have done that several times to a great, big "Wow!" from the kids I have been teaching.

This morning my wife made her morning toast in an East German toaster from 1972 - it works.

I drilled a hole yesterday in a table (for a webcam) using a hand drill my grandfather was given as
a birthday present by his sister in 1919: going and getting my electric drill, extension cord and so
forth (and then tidying it away again) would have added 30 minutes to the whole exercise.

I use a Belkin Nostromo gamepad for shortcuts while I am LiveCode programming: it is at least 20 years old and
supposedly "out of date". And I do a lot of my LiveCode programming on a 2006 INTEL iMac running MacOS 10.7.5,
as well as quite a bit on another 2006 G5 PPC iMac running both MacOS 104 and 10.5 (requires 10.4 to run a
"classic" layer to look at old HyperCard stuff).

It is a good thing I own enough Belkin Nostromos (bought them cheap when they were 'outdated' from a tech shop)
to work with all those 'out-of-date' machines. 8-)
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richmond62
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

I'm really not interested in getting rich from working on OXT.
Well, that's a relief.

Nor am I; but I am interested in there being an ongoing version of "whatever we choose to call the thing" for
people to use for whatever they were using the Community version of LiveCode before.
a 20th century desktop paradigm.
So? An awful lot of people seem to think that "20th century desktop paradigm" is pretty good if the members of the LC Forums
who used the Community version and decamped recently are anything to go on.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

19500+ people registered for LC forums in the last 15 years, and 99.9% were long gone before the end of open source.
There are over 1000 threads on those forums that were never answered.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

There are over 1000 threads on those forums that were never answered.
1. Quite a few of those unanswered threads were announcements.

2. Quite a few of those unanswered threads were people trawling for someone else to do their 'homework'.

3. Quite a few of those unanswered threads were ones that SHOULD have been answered by someone from LiveCode central.

4. Quite a few of those unanswered threads were SPAM from Russian bots.

Perhaps #3 is the most embarrassing.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

19500+ people registered for LC forums in the last 15 years, and 99.9% were long gone before the end of open source.
This does not really tell us anything at all.

What might tell us something at least vaguely instructive is if those figures were compared with similar Forums over
a similar period.

For instance.

I am a registered member of the stardot forums [ https://stardot.org.uk/forums/index.php ]
for people who use either BBC Micro computers or emulators of them.

There are 4353 members, and at the moment I am typing there
are 237 users online :: 8 registered, 1 hidden and 228 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes).

What does this tell you?

1. At least 4353 people are as nutty as one can reasonably be about ancient computers.

Not much else.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

Quite a few of those unanswered threads were ones that SHOULD have been answered by someone from LiveCode central.
Or someone from the community that knows something but the 'community' is desolate, always has been, that's why i walked away 14 years ago and why instead of backstabbing our efforts here by talking trash about us on LC forums, I go out in the wide web and try to get people on board.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

why instead of backstabbing our efforts here by talking trash about us on LC forums
?
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

1. At least 4353 people are as nutty as one can reasonably be about ancient computers.
A) x% of them are bots, just like 98% of our new users everyday are bots

B) old hardware isn't our platform

C) actual real world statistics gathered by professionals say that 55% of internet access is from mobile devices, and 42% is from desktops, ie, your random sampled anectdotes don't measure up against reality.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

old hardware isn't our platform
I would question the 'our' there.

Old hardware may not be your platform, but it is the platform of a large part of the world,
and to a large extent it is that part of the world that needs a consistent and reliable way to
produce applications for that old hardware.

Personally my platform (and, as a single individual this has little or no bearing on the matter; but I am not
adopting the royal 'we') is any hardware I can get up and running a reasonably stable operating system.

To be extra-obtuse, consider an 18 year old PC running ReactOS . . . I have certainly had versions of
LiveCode Community running on that sort of rig, and teachers in piss-poor corners of the world have
proven that they can be productive with that sort of rig.

I was unaware that there had been a survey conducted by the bosses of the OpenXTalk initiative
to work out what sorts of hardware (and operating systems) people might want targetted.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

We are developing software here. 32 Bit systems are already deprecated.

The next phase of software development is online applications via decentralized global servers.
The Current dominating phase of software is already web apps.

Apps on a desktop are going the way of the dinosaur.
You can disgree until you are green it won't change that fact.
You can not like that fact, and it still won't change that fact.

Hanging on to the old paradigm will not bring in support we need to make this thing work,

Why don't you take your PHD and build some useful materials for this project instead of griping all the time?
Port BBC Basic to Builder code to keep your hands busy.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by richmond62 »

32 Bit systems are already deprecated.
That's funny: no-one seems to have told LiveCode that:

LC 9.6.5 RC-2
-
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SShot 2021-11-16 at 19.46.12.png (92.69 KiB) Viewed 5353 times
-
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SShot 2021-11-16 at 19.46.31.png (47.26 KiB) Viewed 5353 times
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by xAction »

The base of Livecode's build process is a 10 year old scripting language.
They still have dependencies to Windows 8.1 the support for which Microsoft canceled two years before they even posted the open source to github.

Their Mac OS X 32Bit support is already deprecated.

Microsoft is beginning to phase out 32-bit support for Windows 10 May 2020

Windows 11 hardware requirements, 32-bit Windows is no longer a thing June 24, 2021

You're so out of touch Richmond.
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Re: Imagine something simple . . .

Post by FourthWorld »

xAction wrote: Wed Nov 17, 2021 12:10 am You're so out of touch Richmond.
You're so unnecessarily aggressive "xAction".
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