When I converted my site to Jekyll & GitHub, one of the things I left behind was a collection of LiveCode (Revolution) stacks. For many years I was active in the Revolution community before going in other directions and over that time, I built up a small library of stacks that I released into the public domain.

LiveCode is a cross-platform rapid development environment. There is an open source community edition available for anyone wishing to get started.

I had assumed that since I had not been an active LiveCode user for many years, these stacks would have become worthless. But in the last couple of days, I have received a couple of queries from people looking for them.

So why an announcement for such a minor upgrade?

Version 3.0 got no announcement because it was not the release I wanted.

Having downloaded the Xcode 6.2 & 6.3 betas, I had worked out what icons were needed to a WatchKit app. This, combined with several other changes, made me bump the version number to 3.0.

Sadly, Apple rejected the update because it referred to pre-release products. So I pulled all mentions of WatchKit out of the interface and meta data and got 3.0 released.

After the Apple keynote on March 9th, I re-enabled the WatchKit portions of the app and re-submitted to the App Store, hoping that with the WatchKit SDK now part of the official Xcode release, Apple's reviewers would allow it to get through this time.

Apple now allows app developers to add a video preview of their app when uploading to iTunes Connect. This video is shown to potential purchasers when they are looking at an app in the iTunes App Store, just like the screen shots.

I have been working on an update to 19th Hole and since it uses a custom method for data input, I decided that a video would be really useful in this case.

The first step was to work out how to record video from my iPhone. In OS X Yosemite (10.10), this can be done using QuickTime Player. Connect your device to your Mac using a Lightning cable (I think it has to be a Lightning cable - the old cables will not work). Open up QuickTime Player and choose "New Movie Recording" from the File menu. By default this shows input from the Mac's FaceTime camera, but just to the right of the red Record button, there is a down arrow that shows a popup menu. Click this and you can select your iPhone as the Camera. Since I wanted the sound effects included, I also selected my iPhone as the Microphone, but if you want to provide a voice-over or sound-track, you might want to change this.

Today I am experimenting with automating post generation.

Firstly, there is the structure of the post Markdown document, which really boils down to the file name and the header.

I have set up a macro in Typinator so that I just type the title of the post in a text document. I copy that title to the clipboard and type the shortcut. The header is then created with the title and the formatted permalink.

To save the document, I use another Typinator snippet to convert the title (still in the clipboard) to lower case and to replace the spaces in the title with dashes.