Disappointing demo

[Jim Lyons]

Yesterday I went to a friend's house and downloaded the demo version of 
Rev 2.2 to his Mac PowerBook running system 10.2. I had been extolling 
the virtues of Rev and suggesting it as a solution to a programming 
project he is working on. In less than five minutes we had a standalone 
downloading a file from the web and displaying it in a window. But in 
that same five minutes:

1. I noticed the Bookmark menu in the script editor. I had never 
noticed it before so, eager to show off the excellent documentation, I 
searched for "bookmarks" and got three hits. But clicking on the first 
two did nothing. I just tried it on my system running 10.3 with same 
result. OK, no biggy...

2. While making the standalone settings we noticed white horizontal 
lines across the text when you scroll a field. I remember this bug from 
an earlier version of Rev (it kept me from selling Rev as a solution to 
a client at the time) but I thought it was fixed. I encouraged my 
friend to upgrade to Jaguar...

3. I set the name of the app to "Net App Test", more than once, but it 
kept reverting itself back to "Untitled 1". This wasn't a problem on my 
system where I had tested this demo. On his system, I had saved the 
stack without setting the name first, so went back and changed the 
name, then made the standalone settings, saving the stack when 
prompted. Haven't investigated further...

My friend was still pretty impressed with all of Rev's capabilities, 
especially with its net-savvy features. But he was not convinced that 
it was a mature and reliable product after these problems showed up so 
quickly. Sorry to seem like I'm just complaining. I cut RunRev a lot of 
slack myself, and look forward to the bug-fix release that's coming. 
The positive lesson to get from this is, to find problems in your 
application most quickly, go demonstrate it to someone.

Can anyone offer any suggestions about 2 and 3 above? I'm just starting 
to use the standalone builder and haven't found much in the archives or 
on the help sites listed in RevNet that is specifically about this. I 
hope RunRev will include a Tutorial soon on using the SB...

Jim Lyons