| Issue 104 | Feb 10th 2011 | Contact the Editor | How to Contribute |
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RunRevLive.11 Races Up
The RunRevLive 2011 conference is almost upon us, and we're firming up sessions and speakers fast. Check out our latest schedule, here. The conference will take place in San Jose, California, between April 26th and 29th 2011. As always, it will be jampacked with exciting sessions, all the latest on the newest LiveCode releases, Keynote by Kevin Miller, a full beginners course based around the iOS platform, and what promises to be a fascinating all day showcase with Ben Beaumont and Scott Rossi, creating an App from scratch before your eyes. I'd like to focus on Day Zero in this article, to give you an idea of what we have in store for you. In a departure from tradition, we will open Day Zero with the Keynote, from Kevin Miller, ably supported by Mark Waddingham and Ben Beaumont. In previous years we have held this on Day One, but this year we have instead allowed the beginners course to spill into Day One, and the Keynote will open the conference. This is always an exciting session, you'll just have to wait and see what revelations it will bring! Day Zero then splits into three tracks. Track One is the beginners course, where our presenting team will guide you through creating your first LiveCode application, covering the basic principles you need to know, from scripting concepts to data and text manipulation, creating an interface, and ultimately building your App using the standalone builder. The App we create together will be for the iOS Mobile platform, although the principles you learn will apply across all the platforms LiveCode supports. No prior knowledge of LiveCode is assumed, and at the end of the course you will have acquired the skills to create a LiveCode application for yourself. This course completes on Day One. If you don't feel you need to attend all these sessions, Track Two is our Guest Speaker track. We're really looking forward to this track, with interesting and experienced presenters talking on a wide variety of topics. Let me describe just a handful. Peter Favaro will give a presentation on The Psychology of Game Design. He has been a game designer and consultant to Atari and Activision. His Alter Ego game for Activision recently ported to an iphone app) has been around for more than twenty years and still has quite a cult following. He tells us that subtopics in his presentation will include basic principles of game design, motivation, frustration and arousal, character development and what makes games addictive. Sounds fascinating! If you're planning an iPhone game, this could be a very topical session for you. Ken Ray will be presenting Animating Stykz, talking about the development of Stykz, the stick figure animation program his company has created, passing along a variety of best practice coding tips he learned during its development. Ken is a well known and longstanding Guru in the LiveCode community, and if you haven't bookmarked his site already for its invaluable tips and tricks, you should do so now! Rama Viswanathan will be presenting The "Wallputer" App : A Real-time "Kiosk-style" Client for Google Calendar/PicasaWeb. This is a clever demonstration of how one can re-use an obsolete computer as a live, realtime calender, hooked in to Google Calender. The application leverages LiveCode's powerful XML and text processing and parsing capabilities to interface with Google Calendar through its API based on the Google Data Protocol. The presentation will cover details of application development, including real time connection to the Calendar using timers and threads and specifics of the API access needed to successfully download data using minimum bandwidth. Check our schedule for more sessions and presenters! If this isn't enough for you, we have a third option. Throughout the day we will be running the Developer Showcase track, where you, the users, can come and open your laptop, and show off your work to your peers. We expect demand for slots to be high for this track, so we will open the booking for a week prior to the start of the conference. Book early to avoid disappointment! This is a great opportunity to sit round a table in an informal atmosphere and discuss all the facets of programming with LiveCode. In the next edition of revUp we'll take an indepth look at Day One, and what you can expect to hear about from our RunRev Team on the newest LiveCode developments. If you haven't yet got your ticket, we still have a few left. You can book here, or if you can't get there in person you can always buy the Simulcast and follow everything as it happens from the comfort of your armchair.
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