Card handling for those who've never worked in a Casino

[Ken Norris]

Hi Troy,

On Jun 19, 2004, at 7:16 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com 
wrote:

> Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 17:48:31 -0400
> From: Troy Rollins <troy at rpsystems.net>
> Subject: Re: Card handling for those who've never worked in a Casino
>
>
> On Jun 18, 2004, at 5:21 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
>>  Not hard.
>
> No. Just not as intuitive as you seem to think. The rest of what I'm
> doing (the logic) _is_ hard... but I don't get fouled by that - at
> least no more than I would expect. Oft times, I think the devil is in
> the simplicity when it comes to Transcript. Oh... that and the infernal
> synonyms, and "does nothing, included for compatibility with..."
>
> I do appreciate the response though. It is helping me jump some of my
> own hurdles. I've build some pretty cool stuff (control systems,
> network conferencing apps) in Revolution (all the way from the beta of
> 1.0) but this is the first app I've done that used more than one
> massive card!
=============
Hang in there. Once you have adapted to the way things work in Rev, 
your experience will begin to fill in again. E.g., I  had a really 
tough time with the IDE.

I see you've just used one big card. That's OK. As I've gotten into 
Rev, I have all but abandoned the usual card metaphor in favor of using 
groups (and nested groups, i.e., groups of groups) and calling files.

I like to use a palette stack, plus a custom menubar, as a GUI which 
stays up front and runs the show, on the order of Rev's own Inspector 
(but for different purposes of course). You can use substacks (which 
become separate stack files at build time) for the various types of 
data instead of putting them all as cards in one and then marking them. 
Trying to figure out which card has/does what seems like an unnecessary 
hassle doing things that way. Instead, you can use front scripts for 
control and back scripts to handle file manipulation. That way, you can 
set up logical file-naming routines, and group things in very flexible 
and complex ways if you wish.

For example, even if you use marked cards in each substack, you could 
also store location lists, not only of cards, but substacks,, plus card 
groups, substack groups, favorites, preferences, and even a history of 
actions and changes, in yet other substacks. Also, you could save 
values, like strings and numbers, in ordinary text files, which would 
make them easier to back up and to read from other applications.

All that should be relatively familiar to you, it's just getting used 
to how Rev works. Eventually you will see how powerful and flexible Rev 
is in manipulating things. With a few exceptions, it's hard to imagine 
building custom cross-platform apps to manage stuff in anywhere near 
the relatively short time you can do it in Rev.

HTH,
Ken N.