Rev Review

[Frank Leahy]

Richard,

I happen to really like RunRev.  But I'm only using it because I know 
Dan Shafer, and in the process of emailing him about another project 
mentioned that I was going to use RealBasic for my photo album project, 
and he, in quite large capitals, SUGGESTED I USE RR INSTEAD.

Before Dan convinced me otherwise, I had looked at the two web sites 
(RR vs RB), the two IDEs, the plug-ins available, and the two user 
communities, and had come up with this list of why I thought RealBasic 
was a better choice:

1) the RB user group is much more active, and there are tons more 
plugins written for it.

2) you can override a lot more things in RB -- e.g. you can override 
the draw method of a list box and get an alternating blue and white 
background.

3) RB has a pretty good table box, which RunRev doesn't have (you can 
fake it, but who wants to have to fake it all the time).

4) The RB app builder is slicker, and seemed to have better placement 
and movement options.

5) The RB geometry engine is much easier to use and understand, and it 
seemed to work better too.

So, all in all it looked like RB was a better choice.

Now back to your comment about the RR apps at 
http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/chooserevolution/index.shtml.  I hope 
you don't mind me being blunt, but that page is quite poorly laid out 
(as, I'm sorry to say, is the rest of the RR web site).  I don't know 
why there are two levels on that page because there really aren't 
enough programs under each of the categories to make it worth having 
the second level page.  And, in looking at the programs listed I'd have 
to agree with Andy that there aren't any that I would call particularly 
"ambitious" either.

But enough of the complaints.  Here are a couple of suggestions for how 
the RR site could be made better:

1. Needs a basic overhaul -- layout, wording, all pages linked in 
somewhere, etc.  And the online purchase process needs some help too.

2. Thd docs should be online, and should be comment-able by users.  
Take a look at the PHP 
(http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php -- look at all the 
comments at the bottom of the page) and MySql 
(http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/index.html -- same for comments at bottom 
of the page) online docs -- both are searchable, and comment-able.

3. Lots of lightweight examples are needed.  RR can do a bunch of stuff 
easier than RB, and there needs to be a couple of dozen examples 
showing how cool some of these features are: images, QT, audio, video, 
file manipulation, database, etc.  These should all be downloadable as 
standalone mini-apps that run on every platform available.

4. Pricing.  If they're going to compete with RB (but maybe they're 
not?), RR should rethink pricing a bit.  $299 minimum for a single 
machine against a $99 minimum for RB was a tough nut to swallow (for 
$199 you can buy both Mac and Windows IDEs for RB).  After Dan's email 
I spent a month building the program, but I wouldn't have ever started 
just by looking at the $299.

5. Target platforms.  A long time ago (1994) I wrote a web server 
plugin that worked on Mac WebStar web server, Windows IIS web server, 
as well as Apache and Netscape servers that ran on Solaris, BSD, Linux, 
FreeBSD and SGI.  I was convinced that supporting all those platforms 
was going to give me a big boost against my competitors.  But all it 
did was take my eye off the ball, and with all those platforms to 
compile and test for I didn't have enough cycles left to add new 
features, which put me behind my competitors in terms of things that 
MOST OF MY CUSTOMERS cared about.

So, RR might consider dropping support for some or all of the 
UNIX/Linux variants if they're finding that supporting all these 
platforms is causing problems getting the next version for their 
primary platforms (Mac and Windows) out the door.  Only they know how 
many people care about UNIX/Linux, but I'll bet it's a fraction of the 
Mac/Windows market, and if it is, it might be time to let it go for a 
release of two and see what happens.

Hope this helps.

-- Frank

On Wednesday, February 4, 2004, at 04:04  PM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Subject: Re: Rev Review
> To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Message-ID: <BC464B9F.3C9EA%ambassador at fourthworld.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> David Vaughan wrote:
>
>> Rev 2.1 has now been reviewed in Australian MacWorld (Feb p68)
>>
>> Andy Ihnatko's review is generally positive in a post-Hypercard way
>> although I personally disagree with his closing comment: "Just don't
>> imagine that you'll be able to build the ambitious programs you can
>> turn out in RealBasic and Xcode".
>
> I think Andy's never been to:
>
> <http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/chooserevolution/index.shtml>
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation