RunRev vs RealBasic (Richard Gaskin)

[Ken Ray]

On 12/30/04 4:42 PM, "cdunix at praevius.com" <cdunix at praevius.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Richard, point taken.  I'll begin by telling about myself.  I have
> fairly extensive experience with the Windows API, Unix, and the Macintosh
> environment.  I am very familiar with tools such as XCODE, GCC, etc.  I have
> recently (within the last 3 years) found that RealBasic strikes a very, very
> good middle ground with power vs. ease of use; not sacrificing a great deal of
> the former.  I can't really complain about their support either.  My only
> knowledge of RunRev is what I'm reading from the website and hearing from
> testimonials.
> 
> I'm sure you're familiar with the saying "all science is magic until
> discovered"
> (or thereabouts), so basically I am curious as to whether most users are
> novice
> developers and are only "impressed" with RunRev because it is something they
> can use, or if it really does pack a great deal of power along with
> flexibility
> to do the "complex" things.

IMHO, Revolution packs a lot of power in an "easy to use" shell. I know RB
as well as Rev, and I would have to say that if your just looking for raw
functionality (i.e. can it "do" <x>), Rev and RB are very similar in
abilties (RB does a few things Rev can't and vice-versa). However, when it
comes to *ease* of implementation (which applies to speed of development and
efficiency), as Richard pointed out, Revolution can be much easier to use
than RB (IMHO), allowing for one-liners that would take RB several lines to
implement (to be fair, this happens the other way as well, but IMHO it seems
that more often than not Rev can do things more efficiently than RB).

Personally I think on of the biggest advantages that Rev has over RB is that
you can go from editing to running *immediately*; you don't need to compile
and run. So for example, if you're working on a dialog box that would
normally take you 5 mouse clicks to get to from the start of your program,
you would have to run that sequence every time you made a simple change to
the dialog box. In Rev, you'd just switch to the browse tool, and you're
"running" immediately; you can test right away.

Just my 2 cents,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com