One of my favorite aspects of creating Widgets with LiveCode Builder (LCB) is that I don’t have to create multiple image assets in order to support various display resolutions. Since it is possible to create very complex shapes using the new drawing routines I no longer have to resort to using PNG images exported from Photoshop for more complicated aspects of my UI.

Busy indicators are one control in particular that are quite a pain to manage. You needed to generate a PNG image for each frame in the animation and you had to create the animation for at least two sizes (1x and 2x). With widgets creating a busy indicator is much simpler and you get better results. Here are a couple of notes from a busy indicator that I just finished working on. You can get the source from my livecode-extensions github repository.

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On March 12th Kevin Miller announced the first LiveCode 8 developer preview at the LiveCode Unconference in Brooklyn. At the heart of the announcement was the introduction of widgets, a new control available to LiveCode developers. Thanks to the LiveCode Github respository, I had been using LiveCode 8 in the weeks leading up to the announcement. As LiveCode engineers made improvements I would update my local repository, rebuild using Xcode, and test. I was so impressed with what I saw that I decided to move a project I’ve been working on for the last few months to version 8 right away. Why would I trust my project to a LiveCode engine that hadn’t even reached a public beta yet? Let’s take a look.

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