revUp - Updates and news for the LiveCode community
Issue 159 | October 18th 2013 Contact the Editor | How to Contribute

A Slug in Excel and Other Stories
The latest news from the LiveCode world including upcoming releases

By Heather Laine

The Life of LiveCode
This week my attention was drawn to a very clever and fun video, created by Håkan Liljegren. This video visually represents the progress of the Open Source edition of LiveCode, showing development as both our development team and the community contribute new code to the engine. Absolutely fascinating to watch, and caused quite a stir in our team.

Seeing the dictionary suddenly blossom out half way through the video makes you really appreciate why this prints as two separate volumes, listing somewhere around 1000 terms. Watch the video at full screen for the best effect :).

Håkan said:

The first post to github was made 6 months ago yesterday (April 10th). I made a small visualization of the project according to GIT. I've got it up on YouTube today and there seems to be some of the latest fixes missing but I couldn't find them on Github so maybe they are not there yet...

6 months of software development in 3 minutes!

The movie is built with a program called Gource (another open source app) that builds the movie out of the GIT commit log. There isn't actually much I did to make the video, just called Gource from within my clone, setting some parameters and piping it to ffmpeg that created the movie. The music was a little more work but made some time ago for a space game that never came to be... made in Logic / Garageband.

Excel Library for LiveCode
Datagrid Helper has been a well known and loved LiveCode plugin for sometime. Now the author, the somewhat eccentrically named Zryip the Slug, has turned his attention to providing an Excel Library for LiveCode. I've been keeping half an eye on this project for sometime, as I frequently get asked for ways to use Excel with LiveCode. The library is in beta testing at the moment, and currently consists of 174 commands and functions for Mac and Windows. On his website Zryip says:

Our MS Excel Library is in open beta since about one month now. This is not only the occasion to fix issues but also to confront the tool with differents users and how they are using it.

This is a good opportunity to improve the tool with users experience.

This past month we have added powerful commands for finding cells in a worksheet:

  • XCEL_Sheet_LastFilledCell_Get which returns the last filled cell in a worksheet
  • XCEL_Column_LastFilledCell_Get which returns the last filled cell in a column
  • XCEL_Row_LastFilledCell_Get which returns the last filled row in a column
  • XCEL_Sheet_Find which returns a list of all the cells containing a specified value, formula or comment

We have also added commands for dealing with print settings: page orientation, headers, footers, etc. It is for example possible to add a text or an image in the worksheet header or footer.

As a great improvement for Windows users, we are happy to announce we are now supporting saving workbooks in PDF formats (MS Excel 2007 or further required). This was supported for Macintosh since the first release.

In the next weeks we will add some examples to demonstrate how the tool is working and what it can do. And of course, we will continue to improve it for a final release planned for the end of October.

Feel free to visit our pages regularly to have news about the MS Excel Library and to send us questions or suggestions for improving the tool.

LiveCode is Good for Your Health
On 5/6 November our training team Neil and Elanor will be presenting the LiveCode Building Blocks Workshop at the Handi Health Apps Conference. This is taking place in the Birmingham NEC and has a strong focus on technology in the health sector.

HANDI Health Apps is the first national conference dedicated to health and care apps and lightweight digital tools to take place in the UK and a “must attend” event for app developers, health and care professionals, managers and commissioners seeking to understand how this new generation of digital tools can support the delivery of efficient, patient centred care.

Heather Laine

About the Author

Heather Laine is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd

 

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