Revolution evaluation for Campus Stack Development

[J. Landman Gay]

On 12/14/03 9:44 PM, Dan Mandell wrote:

> After evaluating Revolution as a possible replacement for Hypercard as a 
> Language software development environment in OSX, I must confess I am 
> amazed that at the lack of documentation and what seem like significant 
> bugs in the OSX development environment at the introductory or tutorial 
> level, executable builds that contain broken disfunctional GUIs.

As a HyperCard user, there are a few things to unlearn. The differences 
you will run across are mostly required to accomodate the amazing 
cross-platform capabilities that Revolution offers. There is a tutorial 
especially for ex-HyperCard users which may help explain some of the 
major hurdles, and can serve as an introduction to Revolution:

  <http://www.hyperactivesw.com/mctutorial/rrtutorialtoc.html>

Revolution's documentation is expansive and detailed -- something like 
1600 pages or more. I've found in general that the problem is not so 
much that the documentation is lacking, but that there is so much it is 
hard to know where to start. Because there is so much to read, it has 
been broken out into various categories. This can give the impression 
that little is there, but you'll be surprised what pops up if you use 
the "Search Documentation" menu item under the Help menu.

> I have only have worked with the OSX version 2.1 but the problems I have 
> seen there,combined with the general lack of user support and 
> documentation, lead me to believe it would be a mistake to try to 
> support the product on our campus at the present time.

If you are using the trial version (or even if you aren't) the best 
support is right here. If you can explain some of the problems you've 
had, you'll get lots of answers. If you are getting error messages in 
your scripts, it is likely due to incompatible HyperCard syntax. If you 
are having other types of problems, let us know what they are.

> If my experience isn't typical, and some of you have actually developed 
> useful educational stacks, please, please set me straight...and kindly 
> share with me a working sample if possible.

Lots of us here have made lots of working applications, many of them for 
education. I'm sure there's an explanation for some of the problems 
you've had, so fire away.

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