The Case For A RunRev Player (was "Stack and Substacks")

[Bill Vlahos]

Rob,

I don't personally find the notion of a Rev Player all that 
interesting. But, if that is what you really want, it would be trivial 
to make. All you would have to do is make a standalone (one for each 
platform) and distribute your raw stacks. Remember that stacks 
themselves are completely cross-platform.

Here are three approaches:
	Set the associations so your stacks are opened by your standalone.
	Make a standalone (i.e. Player) like the old HyperCard Home Stack.*
or
	Have users download the free version of Revolution which will act like 
a player.

*Because standalones can't modify themselves, you would need to make a 
prefs file which the standalone would read and save to automatically. 
The prefs file could be a simple text file with the paths to the 
stack(s) you want to open. The standalone would display a list of 
stacks to open.

However, I don't find this approach all that interesting. I never liked 
the approach of the HyperCard Home Page because it was a world unto 
itself and not integrated with the MacOS like all other applications 
which were just icons on the hard disk. It was difficult to make 
HyperCard stacks work like "real" programs.

Revolution makes this so easy and it only adds about 2MB for the 
runtime.

A different tack on this which I think is very interesting is Richard 
Gaskin's RevNet (http://www.fourthworld.com/rev/).

My $.02
Bill Vlahos

On Saturday, May 31, 2003, at 07:28  AM, Rob Cozens wrote:

>> any changeable information must be stored outside of the application 
>> itself
>
>> Actually, the application can run on all platforms...its just that any
>> changes to the data won't be there the next time it is started.
>
> If there were a RunRev Player app, this consideration would be 
> non-sequitur and main stacks would not have to be "flash screens" that 
> open the real working stack(s).  In building a splash screen to open 
> the working files and contain the MC engine, each of us is, in effect, 
> creating a custom RunRev Player.  With each new app, we do it again.
>
> A generalized RunRev Player would make it unnecessary to design RR 
> mainStack "apps" differently from HyperCard stacks, and an extensible 
> Home stack would provide a framework for integrating multiple RR 
> "applications".
>
> Why hasn't anyone built a generalized RunRev Player?
> -- 
>
> Rob Cozens
> CCW, Serendipity Software Company
> http://www.oenolog.com/who.htm
>
> "And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
> Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."
>
> from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631)
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