Suggestions to increase LiveCode's revenue

[DR White]

1. Leverage the company's UNIQUE application development software that can REDUCE COST and time of development by as much 75% for app development, when compared to other development languages.
2. Leverage the company's UNIQUE ability to have one source code for multiple platforms.
3. Offer a FREE 3 Day Training course for LC customers who want to learn the basics of LC - Limit 2 persons per company. These classes would be held near LC head quarters (to reduce LC cost) and would teach about 20 - 30 students at a time.
4. Dedicate a Training coordinator to take the lead on the above items AND VISIT local school leaders to introduce this amazing software development software to students 6th - 10th grade classes. Show them example apps of how the skill set in coding using LC can improve THEIR students successful rate after graduation. Also, the emphasis needs to be on the LOW COST TO THE SCHOOL (maybe a free one year trail period, for them to see the benefits for them selves - might be a tax write off for LC) The emphasis needs to be on how this skill set can better enable them to get a job upon graduation and prepare students for the new era of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

[richmond62]

And you suppose anyone is going to act on your good advice after the null response to all the good advice that has been offered over the last 20-odd years?

[DR White]

Probably not. But, at least I tried.

[jacque]

And you suppose anyone is going to act on your good advice after the null response to all the good advice that has been offered over the last 20-odd years?

Actually, most of those suggestions have already been done. The web site emphasizes fast development resulting in lower costs and multi-platform development. LC spent a whole year a while back focusing on the education market and as a result the Scottish school system adopted LC as it's intro programming classes. There has been an educational discount for a long time. Attempts to expand that outside Scotland were not as successful.

The only thing I'm not aware of is free training classes.

[richmond62]

"The Scottish School system."

Not really, just a subset.

[stam]

The only thing I'm not aware of is free training classes.

I would add that they could offer courses on video tutorial sites like Udemy.
Many aspiring developers or developers learning a new language use these. They often offer sales which prompt people to browse stuff they don't normally look for and it's conceivable this would extend exposure beyond the the current reach.

The biggest problem with extending LIveCode's audience is the obscurity of the platform. Creating a website is fine, but how would people know to look for it? The target audience mostly will not have a clue.

Using sites like Udemy would likely help select the target audience, which nowadays is (or should be) those that would consider paid-for tutorials and therefore paid-for products.

Udemy is worth a browse - lots of dev stuff there but it has courses on a ton of things outside programming and there are some free courses... It's a very slick platform that makes the homegrown LiveCode tutorials look antiquated. You may well find something of interest there. The point being that others may find LiveCode interesting, particularly if shown in the right light which I guess that means it warrant for an IDE that doesn't look like it's come out of the 90s, which means ideally with LC10 or later versions, which promise to look a lot slicker.

[DR White]

Jacque and others,

I need to apologize for this post. I was not aware of all of the improvements that LiveCode has made to their website. The link below does a pretty good job of describing the advantages of using LiveCode. https://livecode.com/core-benefits-of-livecode/

[stam]

Yes the website has improved significantly, but in fairness it always emphasised ease of use compared to other languages.

The real difficulty is getting people to actually see the website…

[richmond62]

Oddly enough a web search re the Scots curriculum for computer pedagogy and LiveCode ONLY returns a web-page of LiveCode's.

No mention here: https://www.digitalxtrafund.scot/direct ... resources/

[stam]

Oddly enough a web search re the Scots curriculum for computer pedagogy and LiveCode ONLY returns a web-page of LiveCode's.

No mention here: https://www.digitalxtrafund.scot/direct ... resources/

Actually LiveCode is on that page but quite a bit further down, in the green of the Community branding, and linking to a testimonial from Cyril.
But mostly the links are to organisations and charities for teaching, not coding platforms...

[richmond62]

Yes: well: Community Edition: just a tad out of date.

A search here:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/digilearn/

produced no results.

[Simon Knight]

This thread prompted me to look at Livecode's website which I think looks good, however.....

One issue is that the only price that I can see is £10.22 plus 20% VAT per month for a student. For those of us who are not students we have to get a quote. I don't know about you but I generally pass on anything that requires a quote especially when the quote is likely to be much more that £122.00 per year. What I am unclear about is can I rent a fully working (App building) version of Livecode on a monthly basis?

Back to the website. The code comparisons with other languages are good but I would go further and add that there is no need to download other libraries to complete the application building process. For example Python requires additional downloads to build a desktop application or to create an application on the mac status menu. ( yes, I have just considered starting to use Python instead of Livecode)

Lastly, and I may be out of date, Livecode needs to up its game on code sharing; in my opinion the "Sample Stacks" tool is slow and uninspiring.

[stam]

You're not wrong - Sample Stacks needs serious reworking. And the web frontend to this https://livecodeshare.runrev.com is even worse.

Not only is it one of the slowest website I've ever seen in my life but it's it does the opposite of advertising the value of LiveCode.

Part of this is because the site is not curated - they rely on the lazy approach of showcasing stacks with the highest number of "stars" or downloads (which invariably is the mothership's stacks from 15+ years ago) - but these are ancient stacks and it it shows. The content is equally uninspiring - text description of stacks is far too small font size, limited options for the authors etc.

Really this should be made a lot faster and should show hand-picked, curated content on its front page, as much an advert for LC as useful for people. The content section really needs modernising as well - the CSS needs to be made readable/modern, the authors should have the option to include multiple pics (it's the pics that would really drive interest if done well), there should be a changelog facility etc.

Equally - in line with what sites like GitHub does - there should be a licence facility. Mostly, this would be the extremely permissive MIT licence or a GPL licence - but without this, people would be less inlined to share their work.

I dont' think anyone uses the website and comes away feeling happy they landed there... much less so people who are just exploring if LC is right for them.

[Simon Knight]

Agreed!

What is strange is that we can see it as a problem and the mother ship does not. I wonder if a bug report would give them a nudge.

S

[richmond62]

the lazy approach

Nuff sed!
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