who's out there?

[Ken Ray]

> I'm curious.  How many of you use Rev to make a living, and how many of
> you just play with it.  I'm at the point where I can't believe anyone
> could use it to do serious development.  It is just too buggy, syntax
> idiosyncrasies and sloth aside.
> 
> And how many of you successfully deploy cross-platform applications?
> That is my holy grail, but I'm so far away from that I can't even
> imagine it.

I use it to make a living - in fact my two biggest clients have x-platform
apps based on the Rev engine. (The reason I say that is that I use both the
Revolution IDE and the old MetaCard IDE for development, but they both use
the same engine.)

> Finally, are there any cross-platform dos and don'ts?

Well, if you're going to be at Monterey, there's a session on this. ;-)

> I read that the 
> Ask Files dialog is system-dependent at the Filters level.  I understand
> why this might be necessary, but it sure shoots a hole in simple
> cross-platform applications.

It depends on how you look at it... there are certain things that are
platform-specific, and all you need to do is something like this:

  switch (the platform)
    case "MacOS"   
      -- do Mac-specific stuff
      break
    case "Win32"
      -- do Win-specific stuff
      break
  end switch

For example, manipulating the Registry is Windows-only; using AppleScript is
Mac-only; in the case of the answer file dialog there are different
parameters for Mac or Windows because Mac files are being filtered by type &
creator code (something Windows doesn't have), and Windows files are
filtered by extension (something that many Mac files in OS 9 don't have,
although with OS X they do). I believe that the next version of Rev should
have a homogenized 'answer file' command so you can use extensions and/or
type&creator for filtering.


Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/