Hobbyist License? (Was: Re: Wired HC Article - rev too complicated?]

[Dan Shafer]

Jim Witte suggested in a recent post that Revolution consider a 
scaled-down license for more casual users, something that could be 
sold in the $100-129 range and not cause too much impact on RR's 
current licensing model.

In the same post, Jim talked about ways the UI could be simplified 
for casual or hobbyist programmers. I thought much of what he 
suggested in this regard made sense and of course given that the RR 
UI is written in Transcript and uses Rev, making those kinds of 
changes ought to be straight-forward.

This merged in my fertile imagination with another issue I've been 
thinking about ever since I encountered RR. One of the things I 
thought made HyperCard so eminently approachable was its careful 
layering of capabilities. You could get your hands on HyperCard and 
without doing any scripting you could feel like you could accomplish 
a certain amount of  work. Then you'd discover, "Hey! There's a 
scripting language in here!" and do some *way* coool stuff. This fits 
neatly into the broadly accepted UI paradigm called "progressive 
revelation."

If RR could figure out a way to create a similarly layered approach 
to RR (and it seems to me that the potential for doing so within the 
context of Profiles is quite good) and then enable us to "seal off" 
our apps from certain levels of use, creating a product like Jim 
envisioned ought not be too difficult.

Maybe ultimately this is yet another spinoff business much as RR is a 
spinoff of MC. Someone who's interested in the low-end market uses RR 
to create a new product for that segment and licenses appropriate 
stuff from MC and/or RR?


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Dan Shafer
Technology Visionary - Technology Assessment - Documentation
"Looking at technology from every angle"
http://www.danshafer.com
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