Standalone builder 2.2

[Sarah Reichelt]

Hi All,

Having had some time to get used to the new Standalone Builder and come 
to appreciate it, I thought I would share some of my methods:

Splash screen builds:
A splash screen app is one where the main stack is the engine and a 
splash screen, which then opens another stack or series of stacks which 
are separate files and so writable. There is one important trick for 
building these - the standalone must be built from the mainStack so you 
can't allow the substacks to launch before building. After a tip from 
Monte, I have changed all my splash screen stacks so that they only 
move to the next stack automatically from a "startup" handler. Here is 
an example, where the splash screen stack is called "TempMon" and it's 
stack script contains a handler called "initOtherStacks" which opens 
the relevant substacks:

on startup
   send initOtherStacks to me in 3 seconds
end startup

on mouseUp
   if the short name of this stack = "TempMon" then
       send initOtherStacks to me in 30 ticks
   end if
end mouseUp

The startup handler never gets called in the IDE, because Revolution 
has already started up by the time I load the stack file, but it does 
get called in the built application. In the build or the IDE, a mouse 
click will go to the substacks anyway, but when I want to build the 
standalone, I open the file but don't click. Then I can build without 
any problems.

I find it better to quit Rev after editing and before building so I can 
load the splash screen fresh and be sure no other stacks are going to 
be confusing things but this is probably just me being paranoid.

Icons: (sorry - OS X only)
There are some great collections of icons available on the net if you 
look around (www.xicons.com is my fav) but they are not in a form that 
can be specified in the standalone settings for automatic use in your 
app. You can use them by copying & pasting from the get info window. If 
you want to convert them to a .icns file for use by Rev's builder, I 
suggest Iconographer <http://www.mscape.com/products/iconographer.html> 
which can open the downloaded icon files and save them as .icns files.

I hope this information is useful and if anyone has info on the best 
way to produce icon files for Windows & Mac OS 9, I would be very 
interested to here it.

Cheers,
Sarah
sarahr at genesearch.com.au
http://www.troz.net/Rev/