Is Rev too "Mac focused"?

[Trevor DeVore]

On Aug 7, 2004, at 11:18 PM, Chipp Walters wrote:

> Unlike most of us on this list, you are already an accomplished C 
> programmer. In fact, you have successfully written a couple VERY NICE 
> externals for RR!
> Now, I wonder, how many others on this list would take the time to 
> learn the correct C interfaces to the WinAPI (I'm sure Ken would!). As 
> feature requests are made, the RR team has to factor how many users 
> would benefit from them.

I agree that these types of things might not be at the top of the 
development list but I would like to see them in there someday.  As I 
mentioned, I would like ActiveX in order to support other video players 
on Windows but the project I would use it on doesn't have the budget to 
support paying someone to create it yet (I suspect that this type of 
external is way out of my league).  I would be perfectly happy using an 
external to do this if it was available however.

> Also, as you recall at the Rev Summit in CA, Chris Bohnert 
> demonstrated how easy it is to create an external for RR. One which 
> can call a Win32API if needed. So, it seems to me, an interim step 
> would be a really good primer for creating externals for RR.

I agree that a primer for externals would be very beneficial.  One nice 
thing about Director was being able to go out and find an Xtra to 
accomplish just about anything Director couldn't do natively.  If it 
wasn't necessary to hunt down information on how to create them then 
perhaps more people would be involved.  I would like to see some 
examples of interacting with OS technologies that the user interacts 
with (WebKit, PDF, etc.).  I know how to pass data around but I don't 
even know where to start when it comes to viewing data from something 
like WebKit.  I think Chris mentioned that you do something with images 
but some examples showing how to go about this would be nice.

> 'Cause even with a WinAPI interface embedded in the language, users 
> will still need to learn a lot to be able to use it.

True but if other development environments are doing this successfully 
and it is a feature that potential Rev customers are looking for then 
it seems like something which should be on the roadmap (even if it is 
down the road a little bit).  If it is possible to handle the calls in 
Transcript then it makes the implementation that much cleaner and means 
I just have to browse the Windows API online rather than opening up my 
compiler and putting together an external.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com