threshold...and Windows users

[STKing42 at aol.com]

Sorry about this, but this post tends to cross a few threads!  SBE price, 
Active X and Documentation

As an SBE user, I don't think that the SBE price is too high for 'Home' 
developers, I myself have just bought SBE and I am only intending to develop home 
apps, helpful things for my wifes school and apps for a local swimming club. 
And not as cross platform, Windows/NT only  as alternatives to VB, VBA or 
similar (are many apps produced by RR users truly intended as cross platform?)

My purchase follows from a free copy of 1.1.1. pro issued with UK PC-PLUS 
magazine not long ago. I was impressed with the ability of RR to produce usable 
apps in a very short time, with little or no experience. As a result, I was 
perfectly happy to pay the SBE price which is not unreasonable when compared with 
packages for royalty free distributables in VB or C++ etc.

However, after monitoring the excellent forum dialogue over the last few 
days, one thing that is worrying me is whether, as a Windows user, this was a 
sound long term investment.

There have been excellent discussions on documentation and Active X, and they 
seem to me to boil down to OlderMac users have the required background (from 
Hypercard etc?)  or why do we need active X if its not available on MAC (which 
has its own form I think which I get the impression can be more easily used 
by RR). 

To me RR is an excellent product that can rival VB or other languages 
"windows" users are familiar with. Certainly I had no prior knowledge of the language 
and I bought it after about 1 months use - I think this says a lot. But, I 
believe that in the UK, where the vast majority of 'PC' users use windows, it 
will only become popular if it supports Windows features and extensions as well 
as it does MAC features, and due account is taken that windows user know 
nothing of the heritage of Hypercard , RR etc and the language structure is so 
different to  VB for example that its sometimes not obvious even where to look!

I make these points because I got into RR through UK PC-PLUS, which is a 
windows only magazine - so I guess the Rev team would like to raise the windows 
profile (which is a big market in the UK) and so windows features and solutions 
would seem very important. The more users -the more chance RR has of success!

By the way, many thanks to all the forum contributors  - your knowledge is 
outstanding! I have learned a lot already in just a few days of monitoring.

Best regards
Steve King (a windows Rev user)

PS, if I have misunderstood some of the active X arguments, and the MAC is 
affected as much as windows - apologies, this unfortunately reflects the 
non-existant knowledge the average Brit has of the MAC!


>Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 13:26:19 -0700
>Subject: Re: threshold
>From: Geoff Canyon <gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com>
>To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>Reply-To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>
>
>On Saturday, May 31, 2003, at 11:32  AM, Chris De Maeyer wrote:
>
>> Wouldn`t it be a good idea to lower the entry threshold (price) to
>> attract a broader audience? The free edition is too limiting to be
>>usable, and the $299 is quite an amount for hobby users...
>
>The Free Edition may seem limiting at first, but just two points:
>
>First, in the abstract, through careful use of function handlers (not 
>message handlers) you can dramatically expand the amount of code that 
>will fit into "ten" lines.
>
>Second, in the concrete, at least one user has built a massive (300+ 
>windows) application, all in the Free Edition.
>
>All of which is not to say anything about whether $299 is too steep for 
>a hobbyist.
>
>regards,
>
>Geoff Canyon
>gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com
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