The Aborted Plunge (Metacard to Revolution)

[Shari]

Richard,

The logic was two-fold.... the Metacard GUI is supported by 
volunteers.  Anything supported by volunteers eventually gets very 
stressed.  I have worked for volunteer organizations (the Atlanta 
Macintosh Users Group - I used to take the minutes of their 
meetings).  Our homeowner association is also this way.  Somebody 
volunteers, and for life, they have a non-paying job that nobody else 
will volunteer for.  So....... what are the odds that my beloved GUI 
will be around for a very long time?  I pondered this question and 
figured that maybe, the time to contemplate a switch was NOT when I 
had no choice anymore.  Not when it was a do or die thing, forced by 
the retirement of my GUI.

I remember the disappearance of Hypercard, and the demise of that 
program hurt me.  I still have software that was in beta testing in 
HC, almost ready for release, that is still just sitting there.  It 
doesn't just smoothly transport into MC.  It requires a lot of 
changes and major rewrites, at least the stuff that I have created. 
The correlation being that something goes poof, and many changes are 
required to move to something else.

The second part of the logic was that yes, the Rev GUI has a few (and 
I do say few) things I seriously wish the MC GUI had.  One is the 
Search All Scripts function.  This is pretty major.  I cannot jump 
back and forth between the two GUI's to take advantage of one 
function or another, if my programs don't work in the Rev GUI.  The 
ability to set parameters for a standalone and have it remember my 
settings, so that every update I didn't have to do it again, would be 
nice.  In some ways it has better documentation as well, though in 
others it fails pretty seriously.  I'm sure there are other things I 
cannot think of at the moment.

I have asked several times since using MC about searching all 
scripts, and never got a really good solution.  I MISS the Hypercard 
ss function.  That was awesome!  It just took you to each instance, 
let you change it, then moved on to the next one.  At this time, I 
have no working solution at all.  And this bites me a lot when I need 
to change something throughout several stacks, and maybe dozens of 
scripts, hoping I don't miss something and thus create a bug.

I love the MC GUI.  It is hardy.  It doesn't clutter.  I am used to 
it :-)  And it doesn't throw up a gazillion illogical errors when I 
launch a happy stack :-)

I just thought that maybe, I should look into the Rev GUI without 
dismissing it so quickly, as I had done previously.  I thought 
perhaps it would take just a few small changes to appease it.  But 
after the quantity of errors I encountered, even after removing all 
embedded stacks, I am abandoning it once again.  I don't have the 
time to figure out how to appease it.  Obviously it is a project that 
would require days, not an hour or two, and I have a LOT of 
programming to do :-)

If I were to boil it down to the basic features I wish for:

1.  Search (and edit) all scripts in a stack, including substacks
2.  More advanced standalone saving
3.  More detailed info in the Help docs
       a.  Often the Help Index assumes you know something already, 
sometimes I want to learn something new, and the Help Index doesn't 
give me enough to even make the attempt, I must search thru the 
online archives in the hopes that somebody posted detailed code in 
answering somebody else's question.  Even a line or two of example 
code would be useful, but often isn't there.

Shari



>Stepping back to look at the big picture, the meta-question implied 
>by all of this seems to be: Why switch?
>
>More specifically, what features in the Rev IDE make it interesting, 
>and  what could be done to the MC IDE to exceed it?
>
>My hunch is that for any compelling element in the Rev IDE we can 
>find a way to support the same benefit in MC, with the added 
>benefits MC has long provided in terms of flexibility, simplicity, 
>and leaving custom props for custom use.
>
>--
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation
>  ___________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com
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>metacard at lists.runrev.com
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