LiveCode Kickstarter campaign successful

RunRev, the company behind the multi-platform, HyperCard-like development environment LiveCode, reached its goal for its Kickstarter campaign: the fairly ambitious target of £350,000 was met about 60 hours before the campaign was due to end. In fact, although the total amount only approached the target in the last five days, donations then went far beyond the original goal, finally reaching almost £500,000 (about €570,000), allowing LiveCode to be released under the GPLv3 open source licence. RunRev plans to use the additional money to implement more project goals.

According to the schedule posted on Kickstarter, the current source code will start being published on GitHub in March. By autumn, RunRev plans to have completed the restructuring of the development system – the main goal of the Kickstarter campaign. A modular system that can easily be extended is to take the place of the current monolithic architecture. Another key component of future LiveCode versions is a redesign of the front-end, which is currently not very consistent.

The stretch goals added as more money was donated sound promising, as well. Mac OS X support will be upgraded to use Cocoa throughout, for example, and support will be added for creating Windows Phone 8 apps. Automatic scaling of apps to different screen resolutions will make life easier for mobile app programmers, as will the integration of easily switchable user interfaces. RunRev plans to support animation with its own physics engine and add a new vector shape object type and a new multimedia layer.

Programs created with the open source version of LiveCode are subject to the conditions of GPLv3, since they link to the GPLv3-licenced LiveCode libraries. RunRev also offers commercial licences for developers who don't want to publish their code as open source. Examples of programs created using LiveCode are available at livecode1001.blogspot.com.

(Robert Seetzen / sno)