Regular Round-up
What's hot and happening in the LiveCode and RunRev world

by Heather Laine

We are delighted to announce the LiveCode Share Site for high schools students in the 13 - 18 age groups. Students can now upload games and Apps from LiveCode and share, learn, experiment and collaborate with other students from around the world. We've included the ability to comment and rate other games and stacks.

We got the idea for this when students of Cyril Pruzko's wanted somewhere to show off their games and stacks. We're now greatly looking forward to seeing samples of students work uploaded to revOnline and hope that this initiative will help inspire a new generation of coders.

LiveCode Share for High school is a subsection of the revOnline stack sharing area. If you have something appropriate to contribute in this area please do go ahead and upload it, with the tag "high school".

Featured App

My featured app today is Dog Tales, by John Craig. Just launched in the App store, this is a fun childrens game centered around Chips the dog. John says about its development:

"After watching our kids play various apps, we tried to make the gameplay in Dog Tales as intuitive as possible and make the difficulty level challenging, but still fun. An example is how you move the main character (Chips). Many apps have buttons or a 'control pad' on screen that you use to move, however, we noticed that when fingers drift off the control pad area, kids are distracted when the character stops moving as intended and they have to focus on the controls to reposition their fingers. We removed the idea of a fixed control pad : a finger anywhere on the left hand side of the screen controls movement and a finger anywhere on the right hand side of the screen jumps. Interacting with other objects on screen is done by moving Chips next to the object and then tapping it with a finger. This simple gameplay keeps the focus on solving the puzzle and completing the level."

Bett Show

We are delighted to announce that once again we will be exhibiting at the Bett show in London. This takes place from January the 30th to February 2nd, and we will be stationed on the Dell exhibit. We look forward to seeing you there! Last year Bett shortlisted us for their Education Award - who knows what will happen this year?

And finally, our congratulations go to Gracemount High School. I have it from a reliable source that they had the highest number of students pass their programming exams in Scotland this year. Now that's what I call a result.

About the Author Heather Laine is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd