Regular Round-up
Meet us in Bett, vote in the Readers Choice about.com awards, check out Macincloud and more

By Heather Laine

Continuing our Education theme, I'd like to remind you that we will be sending a team to the Bett Show in London next week. This is the biggest UK education show, and takes place between January 30th and February 2. You can find us on the Dell stand, and don't forget to drop by Eurotalk as well, they will be exhibiting many of their hugely successful LiveCode built apps. This promises to be a really exciting show for us and if you are anywhere in the area we'd really love to see you there!

Macincloud
I'm proud to announce we have just entered a new partnership deal with Macincloud. This great service provides an answer to the frequently asked question: how can I build for iOS if I don't own a Mac? Now you can rent a Mac in the cloud (hence the name). LiveCode will be installed on their servers as a standard application, ready for you to use. We look forward to a long and beneficial relationship for all concerned.

Readers Choice on about.com
It's that time of year again and voting is open on your favorite mobile app developers of 2012. LiveCode is a contender, so if you feel LiveCode is the best thing since sliced bread, here's another opportunity for you to express your opinion.

Lazy Man LiveCode Review
I have to admit to a soft spot for reviews by Brian Lunduke. Here is a man who knows how to write entertaining yet thought provoking pieces. What's not to like about a review of Livecode that starts:

"I am a lazy man.

It would be difficult to express the magnitude of my laziness. At least, difficult for me... "

He goes on to say some rather nice things about LiveCode, such as

"What they have built is truly excellent and well deserving of a look by any software developer worth his weight in salt."

You can read the whole thing for yourself, here.

SmoothieRX
Finally, my app of the week is SmoothieRX, an all LiveCode packet of goodness, that lets you build your own smoothie with detailed nutritional information. Not only do you get the fun of watching fruit and veggies blended to a pretty colored mush, you get the special glow of consuming something that you know for sure is good for you. Available on the App Store.

James Little, one of the developers of this app, wrote me to say:

"Todd and I have spent several months developing this app. We needed to spend some time getting a better grasp of databases.

This app includes both iphone and ipad versions.

The app has a database of the nutrient content of 417 foods that users would most likely use in a smoothie. There are 14 tables in the database that provide nutrient data as a percent of daily need, based upon your gender and age. Most food nutrient databases provide data in grams, milligrams or micrograms; users must know what their daily requirement is for each nutrient to translate this into practical knowledge of the nutrient content of their recipe. The app also calculates your daily caloric need to maintain your current body weight; this is based upon gender, age, height, weight and activity level.

For the vertical bar charts we considered several 3rd party options but ended up hand-coding in Livecode. I think the result works well on iPad but is only passable on iPhone, because of the limited digital real estate.

We've used 4 externals from Monte Goulding's MergExt suite (mergeAES, mergeReader, mergeSettings, mergeSocial). "