Saving Standalones and files

[cowhead]

I finally got this and thought I would share it with the list.  If you
must save changes to your standalone, make the parts that are saved
'substacks' of some mainstack (which can just be a splashscreen and
nothing more).  This much has been mentioned on this list before.  But
when you build the standalone, you must click the box "save substacks in
separate folder".  If you don't do this, the changes made during running
of the app are not permanently saved.

Also, in metacard, if you had the engine on the computer, you did not
have to make a standalone.  Rather, you could just click directly on the
file (without first opening metacard) and it would usually run pretty
well, including saving changes if you had that scripted in (e.g. on
closeStack, save me).  However, Revolution seems to require that you use
the Distribution builder, and actually build a distribution as a "File"
(rather than the standalone option).  If you do this, scripted saving
will work, and the "ask" dialogue will also function etc.  I don't know
what you would call this 'file'.  It seems to be a 'semi- standalone'.
It has the advantage that such stacks seem to function well on the Mac,
whether opened with OS X or OS classic (although the appearance is
different in each environment).  So, for example, you can make one
'semi-standalone' and then share this on a LAN, even if some of those
computers are running OSX and others classic.  There is one big BUT
however, and that is externals.  The externals are specific to the OS.
If you try to call a 'classic' extrernal under OS X, it will crash the
program.  So if you are using externals, you will still have to make two
different stacks for each environment (unless there is a clever
work-around that I don't know about.)

Kanpai!
mark mitchell
japan