Why 7Mb?

[Dan Shafer]

On Sep 5, 2004, at 3:17 PM, Troy Rollins wrote:

>
> On Sep 5, 2004, at 5:55 PM, Wilhelm Sanke wrote:
>
>> If you think such a wonderful all-purpose animal is the perfect 
>> design example for a player then you indeed need an application the 
>> size of 7.4 MB to open a stack of maybe only 20 KB, a situation of 
>> tremendous overkill.
>>
I think you are perhaps not considering the circumstances under which 
the player is an ideal solution, Wilhelm. I don't think it is intended 
to be a general-purpose solution to all things. If you have 
applications to sell or provide to people and if most of your users 
will use only one program from you, creating a standalone application 
in Revolution will obviously be much more efficient.

But imagine a scenario in which you have a limited number of customers 
or users who will want to receive from you, over time, dozens of 
"stacks". This might, e.g., be the case in a college classroom or lab 
situation, or even in a department or work group. In that case, it 
would obviously be vastly more efficient for each person to have ONE 
7MB player file and a dozen 20-100K stack files they could run with 
that player than to have a dozen 4MB applications.

The Player, assuming I understand the RunRev strategy correctly even in 
part, is intended to provide a way for people who wish to use Dreamcard 
rather than Revolution to build their stacks/applications, without 
losing the ability for others to run those stacks without having to buy 
the full Revolution product. It's not the only solution and it's 
certainly not always the best solution, but I submit it has lots of 
applications.

Since nobody is forced to use this approach, it seems unnecessary to 
argue about whether it makes sense and whether the player is too big. 
It either suits your needs or it doesn't.

At least that's my two cents (Euro cents?)



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Revolutionary
Author of  "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info
Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)