Halfway on the Business Academy

Halfway on the Business Academy
Reporting on progress from the latest RunRev Academy

I must say, I'm finding the Small Business App Academy absolutely fascinating. I've been involved in documenting the videos for you and I've learned dozens of new things I never knew - and I know I'm not alone! The feedback we're getting is tremendous. It seems that keeping the videos short and just showing one concept at a time is going down a storm with you, the users. We've now reached the half way mark and sent out 30 videos (well, 34 as of today).

I thought it would be interesting to pick out here one or two of the most popular videos and show you a couple of the tricks I've learned.

A video that has received a fabulous 5/5 rating is the one on Word Count and Document Stats. This uses the new "textChanged" message introduced with 5.5:

on textChanged
       put the number of words in me && "words" && the number of \
         characters in me && "characters" into field "Stats"
end textChanged

To try this out you need a stack with a field of text, and another field underneath it called Stats:

You enter the code in the Code Editor for the main field of text. Now whenever you make a change in the text field, the readout in the stats field will change, giving you the number of words and characters. Neat! The full three minute video also shows you how to find the number of instances of a particular word.

Another video that has got very high ratings is the excellent one from Ben Beaumont on how to create a beautiful pill button entirely within LiveCode, using the graphics effects that are built in, and some very simple code. I had no idea you could do so much just by using the Graphics Effects pane of the Property Inspector! Take a look for yourself - you'll need a stack with a rectangle graphic, then bring up the Property Inspector, go to Graphics Effects, and start playing around:

The code used to change the color of the button according to where the mouse is:

on mouseEnter
   set the backgroundcolor of me to "118,0,255"
end mouseEnter

on mouseLeave
   set the backgroundcolor of me to "0,118,255"
end mouseLeave

on mouseDown
   set the backgroundcolor of me to "180,0,120"
end mouseDown

on mouseUp
   set the backgroundcolor of me to "118,0,255"
   
   answer "hello world"
end mouseUp

If this has piqued your interest, and you're not already in the Business Academy, you can sign up here.