The Aborted Plunge (Metacard to Revolution)

[Shari]

>It hurt all of us, and none more so than Apple (yet I doubt they 
>have anyone left with enough imagination to understand what it could 
>have been; the world is bigger than Widgets).

I thought I heard rumor recently of some new thing Apple was working 
on.  I remember thinking that if they came out with any sort of xCode 
product, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because I wouldn't 
want to be ditched again.  So yes, they did hurt themselves as well. 
I remember people were begging them to open source HC.  It could have 
lived on and been expanded.  In a way, it actually did, through all 
the efforts and hard work of Metacard.  MC is what HC should have 
become, but never did.

>Long live the Revolution.

Hear, hear!  Long live the Revolution!

>Historically the MC IDE project had maintained a mandate for minimal
>change to preserve the things we liked about it.  As a baseline I think
>that mandate still has some value, but I have to admit that it's too 
>sparse to let me get my work done efficiently by itself, which is 
>why I invested the time making devolution.

I've heard of Devolution and Galaxy, but really don't know what they 
are.  It is very confusing.  Are they alternate IDE's, replacing the 
Metacard IDE?  Or are they plugins to the MC IDE?

>Even if your stacks could be moved back and forth without error, why 
>bother with the extra work?

You hit upon the exact reason I thought it was worth looking into the 
Rev IDE.  With the thought of an eventual switchover.  But I just 
couldn't be happy in it, not now, not at this time.  It's too 
irritating.  (sad smile)

>Remember, Rev has one-click builds because Ken and I have been using my
>Standalone Ranger for so long we insisted on it. :)
>
>Short-term:  My Standalone Ranger is a front-end to MC's Standalone
>Builder, which lets you save the settings to a custom prop in the target
>stack's first card (yes, I know it's  prop, but it's optional and you're
>made aware of what it's doing; no behind-you-back property hijacking).
>If you promise to provide feedback I can email it to you.

I would love to.  I'm getting ready to turn the Happy Stack into a 
standalone in the next couple weeks (or more likely on Thursday.....) 
It's an update, and has been made into a standalone maybe 20 versions 
by now?  So it's an old pro.  If any stack could give your SR a 
workout, this stack would ;-)  If SR survived this project, I'd say 
it was built like a tank :-D

>Agreed.  Ideally we'd get a volunteer to be the owner for the
>mcDictionary project.  There's an earlier version in MC Yahoo Group
>which grabs all the thousands of tiny XML files and puts them into a
>stack which can take advantage of the performance and flexibility of the
>object model.

I thought there was something like this in the works already?  I seem 
to recall hearing about it a year or two ago?  But I hadn't upgraded 
to Rev/MC yet, so couldn't partake of it.  I seem to recall talk of 
something where anyone could share pieces of code, that would become 
part of a universal dictionary of sorts for Rev/MC.

>So I started sketching out it's successor, DarksIDE: a Rev plugin with
>just one button:  "Install MetaCard".  It would do all the steps we
>currently do manually, from rebuilding the engine to downloading the 
>IDE to importing the Dictionary content, putting everything into a 
>new folder all tidy and ready to go.

This reminds me, does the Standalone Ranger also update the infoplist 
and pkginfo files on MacOSX so that we don't have to go into the 
Contents folder and do it manually?  Icons, too, by any chance?

>>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.
>
>Was HC's script editor modal?  I'd thought it wasn't.  If not, how did
>ss suspend while the script was being edited?

LOL!  I have no idea.  But no feature ever was missed more than this 
feature :-)

>There are many who expound on the benefits of open source.  This is 
>an opportunity to demonstrate those benefits, delivering an IDE 
>which is to Rev what Firefox is to Internet Explorer.
>

Firefox?  Eh?  Vat iz dis?

Shari

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