As for distribution, you can still distribute stacks and people who have livecode can run it without fuss. That still works. One unique feature from livecode is its ability to cross-compile a standalone and I decided to demo that in the post because I felt many people would like to distribute applications, that dosn't mean it is the only way to do it.
A technique that many of us use is having a "loader stack" which just load a stack from disk or network, then we build a standalone from that loader stack, while still being able to edit the real stack. This made creating self-updating applications really easy before the days of sparkle and notirizaton. I remember shipping auto-updating applications on early MacOS X (and I bet people did it in classic).
As for XCMD they used to work but they don't anymore. Now, livecode has "livecode builder" language which is a low-level livecode-like language that allows you to do FFI, and you can still build "externals" which are native modules that you can call from livecode.
Well, now you just need to get a "livecode player" shipped in something widely distributed by default. :-D
The ability to cross compile is VERY cool, and I don't mean to belittle it or suggest that passing stack files around is better. As someone who builds software for distribution, the cross compilation is much better, and getting it done with compatibility that wide is technically really impressive.
But putting myself back in the headspace that had me using HyperCard, sharing my stuff without any build step at all was a big deal.
I like your loader stack technique. It sounds like just the sort of thing we'd have tried in HC if network access had been a common, reliable thing.
As for distribution, you can still distribute stacks and people who have livecode can run it without fuss. That still works. One unique feature from livecode is its ability to cross-compile a standalone and I decided to demo that in the post because I felt many people would like to distribute applications, that dosn't mean it is the only way to do it.
A technique that many of us use is having a "loader stack" which just load a stack from disk or network, then we build a standalone from that loader stack, while still being able to edit the real stack. This made creating self-updating applications really easy before the days of sparkle and notirizaton. I remember shipping auto-updating applications on early MacOS X (and I bet people did it in classic).
As for XCMD they used to work but they don't anymore. Now, livecode has "livecode builder" language which is a low-level livecode-like language that allows you to do FFI, and you can still build "externals" which are native modules that you can call from livecode.