Unicode is finally here with LiveCode 7 and signals an end to the 6.x series. That’s not strictly true as we’ll be releasing LiveCode 6.7 this week, but it does offer the opportunity for a new take on our brand.

Our core brand was developed by Steve Thomas and I back in 2013 when LiveCode went open source and has provided us with a recognisable brand and mark that we’ve built our design work around ever since.

Developing it further for LiveCode 7 was somewhat of a challenge. It is complete in itself and is most distinctive when sitting alone.

The character of the LiveCode 7 release is found in the unicode feature, which enables the transparent use of unicode within a LiveCode app. LiveCode has always been a great tool for people working with text and that has now been extended to everyone, no matter their language of choice. Characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs are all in LiveCode’s vocabulary whether you are working with Arabic, Mandarin, Bengali or English. The heart of this release is text, and the heart of text is type, so it formed a natural starting point for our branding treatment for the LiveCode 7 series.

Typography in design is a passion of mine and Ben Barret-Forrest has made a wonderful introduction to the history of typography:

When you start exploring type, you can’t help but be drawn in. Every font has a personality a

nd can be used to help to communicate something different.

The sheer volume and variety of Roman fonts is astounding and most are beautiful in their own way (apart from Comic Sans of course!). However, you have seen and experienced nothing of the beauty of typography until you take a look at the worlds languages printed on paper. The imagination, creativity and elegance on display in fonts for scripts like Arabic, Mandarin and bengali is simply wonderful:

“hello” in Arabic in the font ‘Sana’

“hello” in Bengali in the font ‘Bangla MN’

“hello” in Telugu in the font ‘Arial Unicode’ (Who would have though Arial would be so beautiful!)

For the LiveCode 7 brand we took the word “hello”, the starting point for anyone learning a programming language (hello world app) and combined it with the world's most beautiful scripts and fonts, capturing the key feature in LiveCode 7. Our hope is that it declares to all that LiveCode is now a tool that can be used by anyone worldwide and for anyone worldwide.

LiveCode 7 has been over 18 months in the making and has seen us overhaul and modernise the core of the engine as well as provide full transparent unicode support. It has provided a foundation upon which we can build the LiveCode of the future. Our vision has always been to make programming simple so watch this space in 2015.

Thanks to Ali Lloyd, Sebastian Nouat, Fraser Gordon, Panos Merakos, Hanson Schmidt-Cornelius, Elanor Buchanan, Ian MacPhail, Michael McCreary, Peter Brett and Mark Waddingham for their hard work and dedication to make LiveCode 7 a reality. And thank you to our community for your support in testing and feeding back as we refined LiveCode 7 for final release.

Get LiveCode 7 today!