i can barely believe its been a year. Our first full year as an Open Source tool, and it was packed with milestones.

One better than Mr Heinz

We delivered no fewer than 58 releases over the course of 2014. That's a touch over 1 per week. However you look at it that's an astounding rate of output! While working on releases, our development team also fixed 1844 bugs, that's a throughput of 5/day for every single day of the year.

LiveCode 6.6 and beyond

While Scotland remained a part of the United Kingdom, LiveCode gained Resolution Independence, on desktop as well as mobile.

Taking Over the World

With LiveCode 7, we delivered a unicode implementation that seamlessly handles Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic including right to left text and any other of the worlds languages you care to throw at it. This was a massive project which we were delighted to ship, and now allows us to merge the three major LiveCode development threads we had going for most of 2014. I don't think our development team wish to go through that process again!

Biggest Team Ever

LiveCode has legs. 46 legs altogether, and 26 legs in its Dev team, the most ever devoted to driving it forward. New faces have been joining the team all year, we've welcomed Jana, Georgia, Iain, 2 additional Steven's, (we've got to stop hiring Steven's!) and Peter in 2014.

But enough of looking back. What about 2015? What lies ahead?

Create it Course

The first Big Thing of 2015 is already upon us - the brand new Create it with LiveCode course starts next week. It is probably the biggest and most comprehensive training course we've run yet and we really think it will be the best. It is running all the way through until May, and offers a thorough grounding in LiveCode via teaching how to code well known mobile apps that ship on smart phones everywhere. In depth, engaging, and beautifully explained - I can't wait to see the results. This also represents a new departure for us as it is a collaboration with Digital Pomegranite, who are providing a lot of the resources.

Widgets

Probably the most eagerly anticipated event is the shipping of LiveCode 8. This release contains brand new technology allowing any developer to extend LiveCode with new functionality by writing libraries or objects. The first full build of LiveCode 8 was made before Christmas and the team is starting to build new controls and libraries to test and refine the new technology. Early results are very promising.

You can expect to try out LiveCode 8 in Q1 of 2015 with the team nearing to DP1 stage of the project.

Open Language

Work is progressing on this innovative new area for LiveCode. It's all very much still under wraps, however we do expect it to ship in version 9 of LiveCode. I have extracted the following pearls of wisdom from Mark Waddingham, our CTO:

The new language variant (LiveCode Builder) we are creating (intended to be a stricter, statically compiled, systems building variant of LiveCode Script) allows syntax to be crafted easily in a static way (the syntax you can use is defined at the point the compiler is built) - V9 and Open Language will see that changed so syntax is actually dynamic... i.e. You will be able to write a module that defines new syntax, then the compiler will be able to use that to build other modules - *without* recompiling the compiler.

In V9, the LiveCode Script language will be rehosted on the VM and infrastructure we're building for V8 meaning that this dynamic syntax will be available in both LiveCode Builder and LiveCode Script.

More Roadmap

We still have a number of items queued on our roadmap, which will get attention after LC8 ships. A Physics engine for LiveCode and deployment to Windows Mobile remain on our radar and we are looking forward to providing these for you.

HTML5

As I'm sure you all remember, we ran a campaign last year to raise enough money to build LiveCode for HTML5. We expect to be shipping this late summer this year, and I know the backers of this project really can't wait! It will be very exciting to see LiveCode running seamlessly in webpages.

All in all, its going to be a great year! From myself and all the team here at LiveCode I would like to wish you all

A Very Happy New Year!