Rev and open source (was "What Rev Needs")

[Richard Gaskin]

Devin Asay wrote:
> The main point is that Rev has the right hooks that make it easy to  
> pull together into a nice GUI a lot of open source technologies that,  
> by themselves, are kind of arcane for people like me. :-) It's one of  
> the things that makes Rev a powerful tool--it makes it easy to  leverage 
> other powerful technologies with no modifications out of the  box.
> 
> I think it's a story we could do a better job telling

Well said.  I think that's probably the most important of all the 
recommendations to come from this list.

While we could debate all the other items philosophized here from each 
of us who have our own, often differing, agendas, things that sometimes 
pull Rev in opposite directions ("focus on pros!", "no, focus on 
'inventive users'!"' "raise the price!", "lower the price!"; "focus on 
HIG compliance!", "focus on things beyond the HIGs!"), this is one thing 
I think we'd all agree on, however modest a step it may be:

If RunRev maintained a comprehensive index, with screenshots, of all the 
cool stuff people made with it, there would be no question that it can 
be used for making integrated open source solutions, or widget-like 
goodies, or business apps, or any of the rest.

The current Case Studies are a step in the right direction, but in that 
format it's a lot of work to add more. Those are good and worth keeping, 
but there's some for something else.  A simple summary index linking to 
the developers' or publishers' pages -- with a screenshot (humans are 
visual thinkers) -- would do more to answer the central question in a 
prospect's mind than anything else:

   "What can I do with Rev?"

Those of us who work with it regularly know the answer is "Damn near 
anything you want".  But of course the outsider won't know that, and a 
comprehensive index of Rev-borne goodies would help a lot.

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