Fall Academy Open for Signup
Join this highly successful training course to learn how to get started with LiveCode

by Heather Nagey

This summer for the first time we ran a beginners course centered around live Webinars and downloadable coursework, to get new users of LiveCode up and running with their first Mobile app. The academy was so successful that we are delighted to announce that we are repeating it this autumn (that's the Fall, for our American friends).

When?
The Academy program will run from 12th September to 26th October. The course registration is now open and you can sign up here. The live Webinars will be held every Tuesday, at 5pm UK time.

Where?
This is an online course, you can participate from anywhere in the world. All you need is an internet connection. If you are unable to attend the live Webinars, you will be able to download them after they have been held, and view them offline at your leisure.

How does it work?
Every week for seven weeks, starting on September 12th, we will hold a Webinar during which you can ask live questions. Each Webinar will have coursework materials associated with it, which you work through to understand the concepts presented. At the end of seven weeks you should have built your first Mobile app.

Sign up a Friend
Do you know someone you think could benefit from this beginners course? Just for you, we have a special "refer a friend" program. For every person you recommend who completes the course, we'll give you a $50 credit to spend in our store. Just email us the details of the person you recommend, and we'll send you the coupon when they graduate from the Academy.

Previous students
Our involvement with you doesn't end when you complete the Academy. We want to know how you get on with LiveCode on your own, and continue to look for ways to help you after the end of the course. We followed up recently with some of the first "graduates" of this course, and we'd love to share some of their stories with you.

The Lawyer's Story

"I'm not working as a professional programmer, but as a lawyer... We frequently organize seminars for our clients ... I came up with the idea of providing an iPad app for free instead of the regular hand-outs we provide for these meetings. Our marketing department thought this was a great idea but - after consulting with our ICT guys - tried to convince me that it would take to much trouble (time, resources) to develop the app.

So, then I came up with the idea of making the App myself. [After completing the Academy] I made my first App. I'm afraid I only used 1% of the possibilities of Live Code, but even that proved to be more than enough for the app I was making.

A week ago or so I showed it to our marketing department. They really liked it. With my team of lawyers I planned a seminar in October ... this time we will give an update of recent developments and - hopefully - be able to present our Wabo-app." Cees Kniestedt, Lawyer

The Martial Artist's story

Maybe you've got a great idea for an app, that nobody else seems to be making. Caio Siebel is passionate about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and needed an app to keep score. It didn't exist, so in his own words he said "F' All, I'll do it myself."

Caio had some clear ideas of what he wanted his app to do. It needed to

• Help athletes to train closer to the competition conditions,
• Train themselves to look to the scoreboard as they fight.
  
• Give Teachers a tool to teach the rules to their students.
  
• Provide small and big tournaments with a good, reliable and simple scoreboard.
  
• And most of all he wanted his scoreboard to help the spectators to understand more about BJJ.

After struggling with Xcode for a while, he told us:

"I found LiveCode on google...The greatest [thing about] LiveCode was the community, nobody treated me as a moron just because I didn't know the simplest things, I hope they still have those good helpful guys around, because I need to learn how to do updates on app store and later on I would love to learn more about iCloud." Caio Siebel, CJJ Instructor

Caio completed our first Summer Academy, and just a few short months later BJJScore is available in iTunes, made entirely in LiveCode. Congratulations!

The Business Analyst's story
LiveCode has been around for a long time, as a desktop tool. We have a fabulous community of users who have been making programs with it for years, but many have never before attempted a Mobile app. The potential of this exploding new market has got lots of you excited, and the Academy course, being based around making a Mobile app, is a great way to make the transition. Here's what Lars Vedo told us about his LiveCode way of life.

Background

Truth be told, I work full time and my partner is in med-school, so all our development is strictly evenings and weekends. We don't have a great deal of time to work on our projects but we have no shortage of ideas and love to use LiveCode to rapidly prototype proof on concepts. We've built tools for SEO, stock market analysis, XML readers, news aggregators, Twitter clients, and more. All of these apps we've just used internally so far but we're starting to put some extra time and polish into our most useful applications.

When we heard that LiveCode was launching mobile platforms we got really excited. That's when we pulled the trigger on purchasing a commercial license and starting to brainstorm what we could create. At first we tested a few of our existing apps in the mobile test environment and could quickly see the potential. Our already developed apps would were largely functional but lacking mobile UI.

The App Itself

For Baby Name Eliminator (BNE) we wanted to create an application that encouraged sharing. The idea behind BNE is to enable an expecting parent to download the application and choose some of their favorite baby names. Then email that list to their partner so they can rate those names as well. At that point they can compare the results and see which names they both liked the most.

The psychology behind it is to remove the friction when going back and forth over baby names. By sharing lists and voting independently, couples can compare notes without feeling pressured.

This is a pretty beta launch of the application. We wanted to go through the whole process of building, designing, and submitting to Apple to see how it went. Now that it's live, we have a huge list of features we're excited to roll out.

You can checkout our website and the application here.

Summer Academy

We've been developing apps with LiveCode for years so we are very comfortable with the general process and making nice UI for desktops; however, mobile is a whole new game so we saw value in the Summer Academy (plus, we got an additional deployment license!). Summer Academy started off a little slow going over the basics of LiveCode, but when it got into the mobile specific issues I was floored. The small details, best practices, and design pointers were extremely helpful in the designing and development of our mobile app. Once we have improved our app a little more, we will work to deploy on Android and cannot wait to see how easily we can manage that through LiveCode.

I was also pleased with the format of the Summer Academy. The combination of take home assignments and webinars was great.

I've even demo'd LiveCode to a .Net developer I work with and he's already downloaded a trial since it was so easy to understand.

Find out for yourself
If you are a brand new user, or if you want to get a head start on making mobile apps, sign up for our academy today!

About the Author Heather Nagey is Customer Services Manager for RunRev Ltd.