Develop on Windows or Mac

[Sannyasin Sivakatirswami]

Having worked in print media for over 30 years, we tend to find over 
and over again that "grey areas" are often areas that are simply 
undocumented, which which have, on investigation, fairly precise 
parameters. e.g. "the top border should be exactly 24 points wide and 
sit on the 5 baseline from the top trim edge of the page with baseline 
set to 10 points, first baseline set to 0. In the absence of 
documentation the newbie is just left with "use an old master page"... 
and often flounders. I am currently starting to document stuff more and 
more.

Point: I wonder if these differences between Rev stacks on platforms 
can be given any precise definition? And documented? or is it really 
total quicksand?

We also develop on OSX and would never work on a Windows machine. So,  
can "field sizes too small on Classic 9.0" can be given a definition?

e.g. "a 12 point font in a button that is 14 pixels tall, centered 
vertically on a Mac will fall two points lower on a PC, the solution is 
to set the text height of the button on windows to 14 (or whatever) 
(which is not a legal property of a text button any more, but I used to 
do it...) or, simply make all your buttons 16 pixels tall if you are 
using 12 point fonts.. on the PC the label will sit a bit lower but 
still have a good  bottom margin."

Or, are the continuous OS upgrades and subsequent changes/breakages 
created by the OS engineers going to make any documentation for appears 
on any platform obsolete in six months?

In any case, were someone who did a lot of Mac/Windows deployment and 
tweaking, to document what they do in more specific and "minute" terms 
(with the disclaimer that only God knows if it will be true when 
Panther become Lynx or Windows XP becomes Windows ZX)

That could be extremely useful to the everyone.  Right now I just tend 
to give fields and buttons on the Mac a lot of breathing room and it 
seems to appear OK on the PC... i.e. its a fishing expedition each 
time... ;-)

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org

On Nov 5, 2003, at 1:47 PM, Thomas Cole wrote:

> I'm working on my first big project with Revolution and I'm using OSX 
> to develop in. I want the software to run on any mac and any windows 
> machine. It's working surprisingly well. Revolution is a great piece 
> of software.
>
> My experience so far -- as limited as it is -- is different from what 
> I am reading here. I have found that the Mac classic standalones need 
> much more tweaking than the PC ones. Fields are too small mostly -- or 
> the fonts get too big or whatever. I'm surprised at this because 
> coming from HyperCard I remember how perfectly the stacks would run on 
> any Mac with no field size problems of any kind. Yet the PC 
> standalones are more faithful to the OSX development view with regard 
> to font size -- although the fonts are spidery sometimes and not as 
> nice as on a Mac. Any tips for keeping things the same on all 
> platforms?
>
> I'm rather a neophyte and I don't even know which standalone for Mac 
> to distribute or what the difference is: Fat. PPC. or 68. (I'll 
> certainly want to distribute the OSX version.) If someone could set me 
> straight on this, I'd be grateful.
>
> TOM
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