Who is doing what with Revolution

[Thomas McGrath III]

Gary,
Welcome to the revolution!

I (not announced yet) am launching into my own business based 
completely on Revolution starting August 1st. I have been a consultant 
for some time for a number of companies and decided that I need to 
start doing my own designs and work. I have a few ideas to start and am 
hopeful after that. I am going to be building useful add ons for 
production work and have one very large project that I will do after 
that.

What I have been doing until now is using Revolution for interactive 
CDs that introduce technology for the company I work for. I also have 
been using Rev for building prototypes for an emerging technology that 
will be used on cell phones and PDAs. The prototypes are to work out 
ideas in a very quick fashion and are used to explain the technology to 
prospective customers/investors. The final project will of course be 
ported to C++/Java for download into the devices (unless Rev starts 
supporting these types of environments ;-) )

The courage to start my own business has come from the number of people 
on this list that are using Rev in commercial applications.

I think the only real limitations are things like complex 3D 
applications. Multimedia is not necessarily a primary focus of Rev but 
is very doable. Lastly, I would say having built in web support and DB 
support along with a very polished final standalone product are Rev's 
strengths and multimedia/animation/styled text are where it still needs 
to grow (to my needs).

The one thing I always hated about Director was that you could tell an 
app was created in it when the final product was shipped. It had a 
Director look and feel that was way to obvious. With Rev, as long as 
you follow HIG and GUI standards and keep the product clean there are 
no leftovers from Rev. You can't tell that it was not created in C++ or 
anything else. This is very important to me. I do always include a 
"Created with Revolution" in my about boxes though to give Rev credit 
for this.

One project we had a Director guru create for us took over three months 
of coding to complete and then it needed lots of tweaking to work the 
way we expected. Due to a creative decision I decided to redo the work 
in Rev. I was able to do the three months of work in less than two 
weeks and that included creating nine mini games in it to demonstrate 
some new ideas. The games took up most of the second week. This is very 
fast and everyone (including the DIrector guru) was completely amazed 
at this. They were asking "What did you use to do this with?" and "Wow, 
that was fantastic how did you get it done so quickly?" etc. This was a 
big boost for the Rev work I have been doing for them. I call Rev a RAD 
(Rapid Application Development) tool so they can relate to it in their 
minds. They agree that it is very fast and clean.

HTH

Tom
On Jul 25, 2005, at 8:52 AM, Gary Thompson wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have recently purchased Runtime Revolution having been a fan of 
> Hypercard/SuperCard and Multimediia Toolbook on Windows. I've 
> basically been teaching myself by doing (the documentation being 
> somewhat limited) and now I'm wondering:
>
> What are the possibilities of Revolution?
>
> Are there any (or many) commercial apps built with it?
>
> Are developers using it to prototype an idea than switching to some 
> other tool?
>
> Is multimedia a prime focus of Revolution?
>
> Could I build a business around Revolution? By this I mean either 
> build a software line of products or is it better suited for building 
> custom one-offs for consulting jobs or????
>
> Are there certain apps you shouldn't try to develop in Revolution? 
> Such as intense number-crunching?
>
> I'm sure I'll have more questions but I would love to hear from the 
> Revolution community what you believe are Revolution's strengths and 
> weaknesses.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gary Thompson
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Macintosh PowerBook G-4 OSX 10.3.9, OS 9.2.2, 1.25 GHz, 512MB RAM, Rev 
2.6


Advanced Media Group
Eagle Works Art & Sculpture
Semantic Compaction Systems
Prentke Romich Company
Prentke Romich International
SCIconics, LLC
Artist
Thomas J McGrath III
3mcgrath at adelphia.net