Nederlands:

Na de problemen met de server afgelopen januari, is het Nederlandse forum verloren gegaan. Door bijkomende omstandigheden heeft het even geduurd voor ik het forum weer kon installeren.

Bij deze wil ik je laten weten dat het forum opnieuw is geïnstalleerd. Helaas zijn alle berichten verloren gegaan en ik zal niet proberen de berichten terug te zetten, omdat mij dat veel teveel tijd zou kosten. Excuus voor het ongemak.

Je kunt het Nederlande forum bezoeken op http://nl.runrev.info Als je nog vragen hebt, kun je daarvoor het contactformulier op de Nederlandse website gebruiken.

English:

After the problems with my server last January, I lost the Dutch forum. Due to additional circumstances, it took a while before the forum could be re-installed.

This is to let you know that the forum has been re-installed. Unfortunately, all messages are lost and I don’t intend to try to restore the messages, because that would take me way too much time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

You can visit the Dutch LiveCode forum at http://nl.runrev.info If you have any questions, you can use the contact form on Economy-x-Talk’s website.

On a side-note: I’ll be organising a user group meeting in the Netherlands soon.

Economy-x-Talk is giving away 5 free web hosting accounts. In January, we hired a larger, faster server and we have quite a few additional web hosting accounts available now. So, why not give away a few for free? Your account will be available for free between 1 April 2013 and 1 April 2014 (this is no joke). Each account comes with all common features, such as PHP, FTP, POP and IMAP e-mail, forums and CMS’s ready for installation, spam filters, MySQL databases, PHPMyAdmin, etc., etc., etc. You will have 1 GB of disk space on your account and at most 10GB bandwidth.

If you’re currently looking for a web hosting solution, follow us on Facebook or Twitter and contact us before 1 April 2013. There is a contact form on our website.  You can find our Facebook page at http://qery.us/3db and our Twitter account at https://twitter.com/MoreNewz. Make sure to include your Facebook or Twitter user name (rather than a link) in your request. Because we expect a big response, we will really just answer the first 5 requests. If you don’t get a reply, then we’re very sorry: it means that someone else must have been quicker.

(You can do with your account pretty much whatever you like, except for spamming people, providing adult or illegal content and hosting websites of third parties. You will receive an invoice for 11 euro on 1 April 2014 and you can choose not to pay after which your account may be discontinued. Any decision regarding the admissibility of any content is completely Economy-x-Talk’s to make. We reserve the right to refuse requests without disclosing the reason. Any requests made on or after 1 April 2013 are ignored.)

Now that the open-source initiative for LiveCode has been successful, it is time to make clear where we stand. Economy-x-Talk has quite a few products for LiveCode developers, who might include these products in their own projects. Installer Maker is evidently distributed together with other projects. Would there be any conflicts between closed and open-source license conditions, if Installer Maker is used to distribute open-source products? Not from our point of view, but there are a few issues you might want to keep in mind.

The Installer Maker license isn’t necessarily in contradiction with relatively flexible open source licenses. As long as you consider the installer as a way to distribute your software rather than as a part of your software, you can use Installer Maker for your open-source project. Only very strict open-source licenses might prohibit this.

Most discussions about whether it is allowed to combine open-source and closed-source software in one project boils down to the question whether the software is linked dynamically or statically. First of all, one might argue that Installer Maker and the open-source software it is supposed to install aren’t linked at all, because there is no functional relationship between the two.

Second, any linkage would be dynamical, because to embed a project in Installer Maker, neither Installer Maker nor the open-source project needs to be modified. (Statically linked software needs to be modified before it is compiled, because the programming code contains calls to the “other” software and these calls combine the two projects into one big new open-source project, which doesn’t happen in the case of Installer Maker).

Because the Installer Maker plugin is protected by a password, you can’t use the plugin in the open-source version of LiveCode. The OS version of LiveCode doesn’t include the password routine necessary to open password-protected stacks. You need to use the standalone version of Installer Maker instead.

Therefore, you may assume that you can safely use the standalone version of Installer Maker with most open-source projects, particularly with the open-source version of LiveCode. In case of any doubts, please consult with a legal expert.

You can find the standalone version of Installer Maker at http://qery.us/oc .

Here’s a really (seriously) interesting fragment from BBC’s Blue Peter. Blue Peter is a half a century old children’s television programme, which increasingly often features design and production themes. In this movie, Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, explains a little about his way of thinking with regard to design.

Now on to the not-so-serious part. Look at the auto-subtitles added by Youtube. Either go to second 49 of the movie or look at the picture below:

Ouch!

The announcement about the open-source version of LiveCode also reveals something of what the future version of LiveCode may look like. As you can see, the web option has been removed from the standalone applications settings. The first picture shows LiveCode 5.5.3 and the second picture shows what seems to be the next version. This was to be expected, because the web option hasn’t been available from the RunRev store for a while now.

The second picture is from a video and seems to be from a version actually being used by a RunRev team member.

Apparently, RunRev is working on an all-new IDE, which resembles XCode. This is only a prototype, which is supposed to be included with the open-source version of LiveCode. The actual IDE may look differently and it may take (quite) a few more versions for the complete IDE to be implemented.

It is interesting to see how the new look also resembles RealStudio somewhat, with the interface builder in the middle of the screen. This makes me wonder where RunRev got the inspiration from. I’m very surprised to see separate run and edit tabs in the top-right of the new IDE.

There was also an accidental post to the use list about an al-new properties inspector. I don’t know what this will look like, but apparently the new IDE doesn’t sport the unified interface as shown here just yet. In the above picture, the properties inspector seems to be all over the place, which confuses me. I would also think that there is no place for the standalone settings window in such an IDE and that’s why I think the new IDE won’t be ready for use in the next official version.

I don’t know if this is going to be version 5.6 or 6.0, but given the big visual changes, I’d go with 6.0.

Getting LiveCode (or Revolution) to run on 64 bit Linux is fairly simple. Assuming that you have the latest version of your Linux distro installed (e.g. Ubuntu 12.10, 64 bit), enter the Dash, usually by clicking the top-button in the sidebar on the left and type “terminal” in the search field. You can now click the Terminal icon to start it. In other Linux distros, you have to find a different way to start the terminal.

Once you have started the terminal, just enter the following syntax:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch

When asked, enter your password and let it run. When it is finished, you can start Revolution or LiveCode and most other 32 bit applications.

Did you know that Mac OS X still recognises floppy disks? I wonder how many people realise this.

Now this is interesting. It seems to me that Microsoft and Apple are doing something completely wrong. It appears that half of computer users is still using the previous version of Windows and a quarter is still using XP, while Windows 8 is out for a few months already. It is even worse for Mac OS X: most users decided to stick with Snow Leopard (10.6), while Apple already released two new versions of its operating system.

source: statowl.com

Why does this happen? First of all, because Windows 8 and Mountain Lion aren’t really upgrades. Windows 8 is nothing but Windows 7 with a brick wall that won’t run on netbooks with odd resolutions but will run on tablets and Mountain Lion is Lion with the same yet slightly tightened security measures and a few extra features, e.g. social integration, that nobody needs.

Operating System       Share'  (%)
                      2009   2012
---------------------------------
MS Windows
 Windows 8                    0.57
 Windows 7             3.13  48.77
 Windows XP           56.62  25.66
 Windows Vista        26.92   9.45
-----------------------------------
Mac OS X
 OS X 10.4             2.07   0.33
 OS X 10.5             5.80   1.43
 OS X 10.6             2.54   5.24
 OS X 10.7                    4.62
 OS X 10.8                    2.13
-----------------------------------
Other
 Linux                 0.33   0.97
 Other                 2.02"  0.48
-----------------------------------
') numbers may not add up because
not al Mac and Windows versions are
included
") includes Windows 2000

How does this compare with the previous big release of Windows, in October 2009? One month after its release, Windows 7 had a market share that was 5.6 times bigger than the market share of Windows 8, also one month after its release. This means that the number of users who thought it was worthwhile switching to Windows 7 immediately was almost 6 times bigger than the number of users who switched to Windows 8 immediately. Apparently, the consumer understands what a product really is. Windows 8 is like Vista. It will soon be replaced by yet another Windows version, which will be embraced by all users except for XP fans, who will probably still count for 10% of all computer users by that time.

What does this mean for developers? Apparently, developers shouldn’t always aim at the most recent OS. As a Windows developer, one should target the previous OS, Windows 7, and not forget Windows XP, which is still 25% of your market, although there is a chance that an XP user doesn’t want to spend money on his (old) computer anymore. If you’re a Mac developer, you have a small market already with a mere 13% of all users. A Mac developer needs to target Snow Leopard and Lion users while he still has time to get ready for Snow Leopard, which will probably need at least 6 more months to catch up with Lion. It will probably take a long time for Snow Leopard to give way to (Mountain) Lion, because there are many old machines that still run perfectly. In all its wisdom, Apple decided to not let Mountain Lion run on machines that are more than 4 years old, excluding many Apple fans from the market.

Conclusion: both Microsoft and Apple are excluding important target groups, netbook users and users of slightly outdates Macs, from buying their products. Computer users are well aware of what an upgrade really means to them and they understand that it isn’t always necessary to have the latest of the latest. Software developing companies need to be aware of the fact that computer users with older operating systems will continue to be part of their target group for years to come.

Here’s an updated list of websites for starting LiveCode programmers.

http://h.webring.com/hub?ring=runtimerevoluti1
http://revolution.byu.edu/indexgeneric.php
http://www.runrev.info
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/RunRev/Tutorials.htm
http://www.revjournal.com/tutorials/
http://www.runrev.com/developers/lessons-and-tutorials/tutorials/online-scrip…
http://derbrill.de/developers.php?lang=en
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
http://tactilemedia.com/site_files/software/tutorial_thumbs.html
http://www.hyperactivesw.com/Resources.html
http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/revolution/revolution.htm
http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia/
http://revclever.com/
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution
http://www.runrev.com/developers/documentation/beginners-course/
http://www.runrev.com/developers/documentation/
http://livecode.tv

This is the collection as of December 2012. Please, tell me know if you know about any links that belong in this collection.

The holidays are near, although some believe that the end is neigh. Both occasions are good reasons to offer you a big discount on a license for the Installer Maker Plugin. From 17 until 27 December, new licenses are 33% off.

Installer Maker Plugin is the best tool available for LiveCode to wrap your standalones in an installer for Mac OS X or Windows. An overview of all features can be found at http://qery.us/za and there you can also purchase your license.
To get the discount, click on the Plimus button on the website and use the coupon code 33OFF.

If you have any questions about this offer or Installer Maker, use the contact form on the website.