[MC_IDE] Quick Poll

[J. Landman Gay]

On 3/31/11 2:00 PM, Shari wrote:

> I no longer embed those stacks either, and my two newer (in the works)
> projects don't use Ask/Answer at all. I created my own versions and call
> them up differently. But that doesn't help the existing projects.

The easiest way to proceed would be to use one of your new projects. It 
sounds like you won't have any issues with those. Once you understand 
how the SB works, you'll be able to use your converted ones too.

>>> Now I am afraid to move forward because I keep seeing discussions on the
>>> Rev list about bugs in things that have been solid for a decade.

I'm still not sure what you saw. The discussions I see are mostly about 
mobile. The desktop engine works very well and I don't think you have 
anything to be afraid of. The things that used to work still do, as far 
as I've seen. I don't use the engine for everything of course, but I 
really haven't had any trouble, and I don't recall any bug discussions 
that involved regression. (Come to think of it, for two days you 
couldn't type tabs into fields on Macs, but that was fixed by the next day.)

> I don't know how the whole mobile thing is handled. I know that before,
> there was ONE engine that deployed to Mac, Win, Linux, etc. So while
> there may have been a few platform specific bugs, for the most part the
> meat was the same regardless.

You can still think of the engine that way. It just deploys to more 
operating systems now. But to do that, the language has had to expand to 
allow us to access some OS-specific features, like native iOS controls. 
Those are the ones that still need some tweaking sometimes, and which 
you may be thinking of when you mention bugs. If you aren't going to 
deploy to mobile, you can ignore the new language syntax and any 
discussions about it.

>
> With all the additions of mobile, web, etc., and the different purchase
> options, I don't know how that is handled in the engine. Are there
> totally separate engines now for each area? Is it still one big engine
> for all? My license is good until the end of the world and then far
> beyond that, so I can upgrade, I've just been afraid to.

It's still all one engine. Your license determines how much that engine 
will let you do. There's really no reason not to upgrade, since you have 
the right to it already. The very worst that could happen is that you 
decide to go back to an earlier version instead. There have been a lot 
of improvements in the newer versions though, and you are missing out if 
you don't try it.

>
> As I've never found the Rev standalone builder to be user friendly, I
> never reported an issue to them, I simply sidestepped it and used MC.

This is a little surprising to me. I immediately found it much easier 
than the MC process and it was the first thing I switched to when I 
started with LiveCode/Rev. Maybe all the panes are confusing. They are 
easily explained and each serves a needed purpose that the MC SB doesn't 
have. I could never go back to all the twiddling and manual copying I 
used to do. Building an OS X bundle by hand is silly.

>
> So, yes, the short answer is that I will take you up on the offer as
> soon as this project is ready. And again when I update the existing
> project as that is the cranky one.

Do. We'll walk through it.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com