Business App Academy Announced
60 ways to improve your business using LiveCode

By Heather Nagey

We're delighted to announce our third major Academy, now open for sign-ups here. The academy will kick off on 1st May and run until the 31st. Iit will be based around 60 bite size videos, delivered daily to your inbox.

Why Business?
Our first academy covered making your first mobile app. The next academy was focussed on building your own game. This time, by popular request, the theme is Business. Enabling small business owners and operators has always been at the heart of LiveCode. From its earliest days it has been used to enhance productivity and just "get the job done" in a way not emulated by any other platform. Do you need a quick way to extract a list of addresses, cross-referenced against location? or age? or some other criteria? LiveCode can do it in minutes. Does your office secretary need her own particular interface for your databases? Knock one out in LiveCode in an afternoon, and modify it week on week as new features are required, customized to her workflow. Maybe your business does a lot of prototyping? LiveCode does this fast and live, you can have something to show your customer that he can not only see but interact with, and then you can change it to his requirements in front of his eyes. Or do you now need a fully featured, polished, mobile app, for advertising or to inform your customers? Once again, LiveCode to the rescue.

As those of you who have been using it for years already know, it's simply the most versatile way to tackle all those programming and automation jobs around your business that off the shelf software cannot address. Even better, it can be used by technically able people who do not consider themselves programmers.

Why an Academy?
Something I've noticed about LiveCode users over the years, is that they can be extremely familiar with some functions of LiveCode, and have no idea how to use the rest. One tends to get comfortable with just the bits that one has to use, but never really explore the full potential of the program. You could be missing some little trick that never occurred to you to try, and which would solve a problem or enhance some area of your workflow immeasurably. We'll be trying to address this in the academy by covering a wide range of topics, including such vital areas as using databases, cloud access, multimedia, monetization, data manipulation, deploying to devices, and plenty more.

Bite Size
Something else we know about business people - they're busy! We realized that in order to help you fit a dose of learning into your busy schedule, we needed to make our videos short and to the point. What we have designed for this academy is an "alphabet of apps". Each video is self contained and will teach you one concept, complete in itself, with code you can re-use and re-fit for your own purposes. Put together, all 60 videos will form the building blocks for making your own customized app.

Make an App
A huge goal for many users is to make a full blown app for sale, truly standalone and deployed to multiple platforms. We'll show you how to address this in the Business Academy, with step by step lessons that add up to an executable app for your business. Join our successful customers who are already deploying apps in the App Store or Marketplace.

Come on in!
Whether you're new to LiveCode, or you've been using it for a while but still want to learn more, join us for this business oriented academy. We'll have the usual dedicated forum where you can ask your questions and get answers from our friendly and expert technical team, plus live question and answer webinars. You can build up your library of videos day by day, and access them whenever is convenient to you.

No matter how experienced a LiveCoder you are, if you don't learn something new by the end of the course, I will appoint my cat as editor of this newsletter.

About the Author Heather Nagey is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd.