LiveCode Kickstarter

Five years ago I had the great pleasure of hanging out with Colin Holgate,  who was behind many of the Voyager CD-ROM titles that pioneerd interactive multimedia. We spent a few days in a meeting room inside Tower Bridge at a charrette about the future of education, and the ideas from that time are still central to my thinking about the wider impact on society.

Colin and I both share an interest in hypermedia, and remembered the days of Apple’s Hypercard (and its predecessor, GUIDE), so it was interesting to hear from him recently about RunRev‘s LiveCode, which he rates highly:

Like HyperCard it uses a card metaphor, and a near English scripting language.In addition to continued development, active community, and annual conferences, it can run onMac, Windows, and Linux (even talk of it being ported to Raspberry Pi), and it can publish apps to Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and be used for Server side applications.

 He was writing to let me know that RunRev want to make LiveCode open source and have started a Kickstarter project to fund a six month engineering team that will make the source code more modular, and easier for the community to contribute to. 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode/posts

They want to raise £350K to cover all the costs and are at £120K as I write, and I think it’s worth checking out. It looks like a good product and it would be great to see it available to the community of users. Too often we ask for code to be made available under a better licence without realising that doing this takes time and effort.

I Link Therefore I Am

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

I had to send a fax to a US university recently on behalf of my daughter, and I realised that not only do I not own a fax machine, I have never owned a fax machine.  During the 1990’s I would occasionally approach one of these mysterious devices, a sheet of paper in hand ready to be fed into the slot and transmitted through some mysterious method to other parts of the world, but it was clearly the devil’s work.

I never wanted one of the infernal devices in my home, and it has been wonderful to see emailed attachments replace them for most uses, apart from the odd recalcitrant academic institution.

The recent advent of on-demand video streaming of the main terrestrial TV channels has made me realise that I may never get round to acquiring a PVR, a hard-drive based TV recorder, before they too are swept away in the flood of technological innovation. Farewell, then Sky+ box, I hardly knew thee.

Continue reading “I Link Therefore I Am”