Since you work for LiveCode, do you know if there are any plans to implement platform accessibility APIs, so LiveCode (or at least applications built with it) can work with assistive technologies, such as screen readers for blind people? Besides being the right thing to do, that might unlock some sales to the educational market.
That's a great question. Im interested in visual coding tools but, probably in my ignorance, I wonder how any of them work for keyboard and/or screen reader users.
To be clear, the problem isn't just the drag-and-drop nature of the development environment. The whole GUI toolkit is completely inaccessible with a screen reader.
Sorry, that article is from 2019, I don't work there anymore so I can't tell. I'm a customer though and have been developing with the language since forever, what we usually do when we want such answers is to post to either the mailing list or the forum. Another option is emailing support, they're a small company but they take support seriously and will answer.
Thanks for posting it. I don't think I've looked at this set of tools since it was Metacard.
I love these threads every time they come up. Mostly because I loved HyperCard.
Without fail, everything suggested as a modern HyperCard replacement really nails at least one element of its spirit and really misses something else.
I think this is one of the closer ones overall. Its adherence to the stack model is much closer than the others and its programming language certainly is closer to HyperTalk than any other I recall, besides AppleScript.
Your walk through showcases the similarity really nicely.
It even looks like you can write the spiritual equivalent of an XCMD.
I think where LiveCode misses the boat is the packaging step necessary for distributing your "Apps". With HyperCard, we passed around stack files. And unless we took some special steps to prevent it, they were also the preferred form for editing our programs. So if I gave my stack to you, you could run it as a program. But you could also edit and change it.
That default, where I could throw the exact thing I was working on onto a floppy and hand it to my dad, who could run it on his machine but also edit it if he wanted to is something I really haven't seen replicated.
Maybe that's a side of HyperCard that just can't be recreated today. Or just shouldn't, until the tooling to run the "stacks" gets distributed by default with a major OS.
Thanks for causing a fun re-exploration of a space that was really influential for me.
As for distribution, you can still distribute stacks and people who have livecode can run it without fuss. That still works. One unique feature from livecode is its ability to cross-compile a standalone and I decided to demo that in the post because I felt many people would like to distribute applications, that dosn't mean it is the only way to do it.
A technique that many of us use is having a "loader stack" which just load a stack from disk or network, then we build a standalone from that loader stack, while still being able to edit the real stack. This made creating self-updating applications really easy before the days of sparkle and notirizaton. I remember shipping auto-updating applications on early MacOS X (and I bet people did it in classic).
As for XCMD they used to work but they don't anymore. Now, livecode has "livecode builder" language which is a low-level livecode-like language that allows you to do FFI, and you can still build "externals" which are native modules that you can call from livecode.
Well, now you just need to get a "livecode player" shipped in something widely distributed by default. :-D
The ability to cross compile is VERY cool, and I don't mean to belittle it or suggest that passing stack files around is better. As someone who builds software for distribution, the cross compilation is much better, and getting it done with compatibility that wide is technically really impressive.
But putting myself back in the headspace that had me using HyperCard, sharing my stuff without any build step at all was a big deal.
I like your loader stack technique. It sounds like just the sort of thing we'd have tried in HC if network access had been a common, reliable thing.
