Why isn't Rev more popular?

[Richard Gaskin]

Hershel Fisch wrote:
> On 12/5/05 7:17 PM, "Richard Gaskin" <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>>"Styles"?  What do you want to do?
>
> Meaning, color or gray scale on color printers, print quality on inkjets;
> best, normal or draft, orientation; portrait or landscape and so on.
> Selecting a printer goes along because checks go to the metallic printer and
> other things go elsewhere, ok.
> I never saw in Quick Books or in M.Y.O.B. Or any other off shelf application
> the necessity for these settings selections.

QuickBooks is a special case:  Intuit spent three years studying 
printing before releasing v1.0, and have taken out a few patents on what 
they put in.

I haven't used M.Y.O.B. in years, but recall it being a good program.

But I'm surprised neither of these has ever asked you to tell them what 
printing you're using.

In OS X, Mac Classic, and Windows, it's common to define the parameters 
for the print job in the Print window, with some settings defined in 
Page Setup.  Rev gives you access to both:

   answer printer -- brings up the OS standard Page Setup dialog,
                     which retains settings during the current session

   open printing with dialog -- initiates a print job with the Print
                     Job dialog presented first.  You can also print
                     without the Print Job dialog by ommitting "with
                     dialog".

If you filter the Transcript Dictionary with "print" you'll find a lot 
of properties which govern printing.  You can set these up without ever 
showing the Page Setup dialog, including margins, orientation, scale, 
and more.

The one weakness Rev has is integrating its internal settings with the 
OS print dialogs.  It would be nice to be able to save and restore Page 
Setup info as we can with QuickTime transitions using "answer effect".

The difficulty is that while there's only one QuickTime API, the APIs 
for printing vary broadly and deeply from OS to OS.  This isn't to say 
it wouldn't be worth pursuing (hence the Bugzilla request for it), but 
at least it helps you understand why that's not in place just yet.

Once Classic support is dropped from the engine (no, I've heard of no 
plans, just wishful thinking for the future), printing can be greatly 
enhanced as OS X's printing architecture is more like the rest of the 
world and Classic's is from outerspace.

In the meantime, can the built-in properties cover what you need?  And 
if not, is it really a deal-breaker to present the Print Job dialog as 
most apps do by default?

I don't use either QuickBooks or MYOB, but I don't think I have an app 
on my drive that doesn't bring up the Print Job dialog when I print, and 
for specialized printing (like checks, labels, etc.) it's usually 
necessary for me to set the page orientation in Page Setup.  Maybe 
QuickBooks and MYOB are just way ahead of the pack on those (well, we 
know QuickBooks is).


>>>Or if wanted to add a timer constant running from when the application is
>>>launched.
>>
>>Timers work well.  You might givem 'em a try.
>>What do you want to do?
> 
> Maybe I don't know how to use it, but for what I need it I don¹t see a way
> it should work. E.g. My app. Gets turned off probably ... I don't know when,
> very seldom.
> They are many meetings appointments, schedules that are entered and the
> system has to pop em out as the time goes whithout button pressing and at
> the same time that same app. Is being used heavy for other things memo's,
> invoicing,inventory and so on. My whole business runes on that one
> application. I thought to use separate stand alones for certain tasks but
> wouldn't do the trick.
> 
> I'm big enough to admit if I'm wrong but it has to be proven to me first.
> Thanks, Hershel Fisch

It's not about right or wrong, just about solving problems.  To help you 
with this one I'm afraid I'll need a little more background:

When you write "E.g. My app. Gets turned off probably", do you mean it 
quits unexpectedly or that the user would turn it off.

If the latter, you can query "the pending messages" to determine which 
messages are in queue, and save those to a file on exit.  When the app 
starts up again it could load them from that file and put them back into 
the queue.

Does that help?  Or do I not understand fully?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com