Ken Corey wrote:
On 24/02/2012 14:36, Richard Gaskin wrote:
With 5.5 it's now possible to make a decent word processor, and a few
hundred other things besides....
A word processor!?!?!
Aren't we straying a little far from the right-tool-for-the-job
territory here?
Especially with something with such religious overtones. I can't image
anyone is ever going to make an editor that is cross platform and yet
keeps the majority of people happy.
Of course, if you accomplish it, world peace might seem simple...:^)
For many reasons, mostly market dominance of MS Word and OpenOffice, it
would be foolish to make a word processor as a standalone product.
With most projects of such ambitious scope, feature-completeness is
largely a function of "industrial capacity"; that is, to make something
as complete as OpenOffice will likely require the million or so
programmer hours that went into making OpenOffice.
RAD tools aren't well suited for those kinds of apps, which is why
almost none of us make things like that and why none of those apps use
RAD tools, instead accepting the tradeoffs of using lower-level
languages to gain more control.
But where RAD tools shine is in vertical-market opportunities, the
millions of niches we LiveCoders do address, many of which have yet to
be discovered.
In such niche applications there may be a need for an embedded word
processor, a way for the user to write and format styled text. This
won't be a replacement for Word or OO, but instead is an integrated part
of an app that serves a different, more specialized workflow.
Similarly, many of us have built custom drawing environments in xTalks,
and while none of these attempt to rival Adobe Illustrator, Visio, or
even Inkscape, they're very useful for the goals they address.
Here are two examples:
Mark Schonewille's Strõm Flow Chart Software
<http://www3.economy-x-talk.com/file.php?node=str%259Bm>
Ken Ray's Stykz:
<http://www.stykz.net/>
Just as those developers have used LC's graphics capabilities to deliver
valuable tools for their users, the new field enhancements open up new
possibilities for working with text as well.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
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