Standalones from Old HyperCard Stack

[Dan Shafer]

At 03:10 AM 7/5/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Hey Dan,
>
>Cut my teeth on a bunch of your books, nice to see you're trying out RunRev
>/ MC. I spent a few years with SC but left it all behind when I switched to
>PC's. Jerry Daniels turned me onto RR 7 or 8 months ago -- and it all came
>back. RR/MC is so much better than SC/HC with many more features, compiled
>executables and much, much more.

Thanks for remembering me!

RR looks very interesting. I've poked at it a few times over the last few 
months but it never seems quite "finished" if you know what I mean. Today, 
in working on a very simple stack, I ran into:

*numerous execution errors that are clearly pointing to built-in RR scripts 
I didn't write
* mysterious and sudden relocation of the window I am working on as I 
switch out of RR and back
* on two occasions, the button to return to RR after suspending its UI 
became empty and non-responsive and I could not for the life of me figure 
out how to get back. Even quitting the app didn't work. I had to quit RR.
* mysterious case where a card/stack suddenly had multiple groups (maybe a 
user error, but there was no way I could see that would remove the unwanted 
groups; everything I tried seemed to work but the groups never went away)
* an inability to get create card to make a card with a group on it. 
(Finally sent a note on this one to the list a bit ago).

It does seem to be stabilizing some, but, boy, it feels like there are a 
lot of rough edges here. Is this just me? I'm running on OS X, by the way; 
I have it installed in Win2K and haven't tried building anything there at 
all since Mac is my native environment. But maybe these are OS X issues and 
I'd be better off building on Win2K. (I refuse to back to Mac Classic; I'd 
switch to WIn2K first!)

Anyway, it will be nice when the differences between HC and RR become more 
second nature to me than they are now. I've read the "About Revolution for 
HyperCard Developers" three times but every time I think I got it, 
something else crops up.

>Regarding your second question about the cards... RR executables can't write
>to themselves - I believe because Windows and Linux don't allow for
>executables to do this sort of thing, so none of the RR/MC versions allow
>for this. No problem though, just write to a different stack which is not in
>an executable. It would be a separate file. So...you could have your
>executable as a startup screen which called the main app - your old HC stack
>and things should work fine. Also, you can edit your stack at anytime. You
>can also easily update it by storing your stack (this example is test02.rev)
>on a website and calling:
>
>open URL "http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/runrev/test02.rev"
>
>from your executable. All very cool. You can check out my RunRev site for
>some tips and downloads.
>http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/RunRev/default.htm
>
>-Chipp Walters
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: use-revolution-admin at lists.runrev.com
> > [mailto:use-revolution-admin at lists.runrev.com]On Behalf Of Dan Shafer
> > Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 2:48 AM
> > To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> > Subject: Standalones from Old HyperCard Stack
> >
> >
> > I have a simple HyperCard stack I wrote about 300 years ago. My
> > wife wants
> > to set up her new boss to use it but she's on Windows, so I break out
> > Revolution.
> >
> > The initial conversion *appeared* to go extremely well. But I've
> > encountered some issues and the docs on distribution building that I can
> > locate are pretty sparse and not very informative.
> >
> > Two problems I've encountered so far.
> >
> > There are several navigation buttons on the background. When I run the
> > stack in Rev after importing it, these buttons appear and work as
> > expected.
> > But when I create a distribution, the buttons are not visible. Clicking
> > where they are *supposed* to be executes their scripts so I
> > figure either I
> > have a resource issue or a layering problem.
> >
> > I go back to Revolution and I move all of these buttons to the
> > front. After
> > each such move, i get the following execution error in Revolution:
> >
> > * There was an Execution Error at 12:21:07 AM
> > Error description: repeat: error in statement
> > Revolution User Interface Error: Object: button id 1140 of group
> > id 1136 of
> > card id 1002 of stack "/Diskourse/Applications/Revolution 1.1 OS
> > X/components/tools/revmenubar.rev"
> > --------------------
> > switch pWhich
> > --------------------
> > Value: top
> >
> > The move seems to have worked, however, because when I build a new
> > distribution, I can see the buttons (which are all icons) and
> > they seem to
> > function.
> >
> > So that *seems* to be a cosmetic or bogus bug but someone should
> > look into it.
> >
> > The real problem I'm dealing with now is that when I add cards to
> > the stack
> > in the standalone, the changes don't stick. The new cards appear
> > fine until
> > I exit the app. On restart, only the original cards are still there. if I
> > suspend the Rev UI in developer mode and run the stack, I can add
> > cards and
> > they stick. They even appear in the standalone executable. But
> > any cards I
> > add don't work.
> >
> > Where can I look for help on this issue? Cany anyone shed light here?
> >
> > This is tantalizingly close to enabling me to do a bunch of
> > fairly powerful
> > stuff I've built in the halcyon days of HyperCard and perhaps make it
> > successful at last. But I'm clearly missing something!
> >
> >
> >
> > Dan Shafer, Chief Scribe and Tablet Keeper
> > PythonCard Open Source Project
> > http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > use-revolution mailing list
> > use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>
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Dan Shafer, Chief Scribe and Tablet Keeper
PythonCard Open Source Project
http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net