who's out there?

[Richard Gaskin]

Jon wrote:
> I'm curious.  How many of you use Rev to make a living, and how many of 
> you just play with it.  

I've been making a living with xTalks for 11 years as of 4/4, and almost 
exclusively with the Rev engine (going back to when it was called 
"MetaCard") since '98.

> 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.

I haven't yet seen the development tool with no bugs, and fortunately 
with Rev nearly all can be worked around; there are few true 
show-stoppers, unlike bad headers that have shipped with CodeWarrior, 
and other things you'll find in reading the dev lists for other products.

But unlike those other products, Rev is among the very few IDEs that 
truly eats its own dogfood:  it's written in Transcript, which means 
it's fully modifiable, extensible, and even replaceable.

For example, while I make my living with the engine I rarely use the Rev 
IDE at all, being one of the ol' timers who still use the MetaCard IDE. 
  Other IDEs are possible, a couple in the works, and there are dozens 
of tools available as plugins that work in any of these IDEs.

So if you find RunRev troublesome but are interested in Transcript, with 
a few minutes online you can assemble a toolkit to fit your personal 
preferences.


> And how many of you successfully deploy cross-platform applications?

I ship an average of at least one commercial cross-platform application 
every month for the last several years.

> That is my holy grail, but I'm so far away from that I can't even 
> imagine it.

Imagining it's the easy part.  Making it's not much harder.  The tough 
part is testing it throughly. :)

What issues have you encountered shipping yours?  As with learning any 
new tool, you'll find this discussion list community to be your most 
valuable resource.  Feel free to take advantage of us. :)

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

There are, and Ken, Jacque, and I will be doing a panel called 
"Cross-Platform Gotchas" at RevCon West in two weeks:
<http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest/>

We'll post our notes somewhere on the web so those who couldn't make it 
can get at least an overview of what's covered.


> 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.
> :)

Mac OS, OS X, and Windows each uses a different means of identifying 
file types.

It's not possible for RunRev to know all the file possible combinations 
of file types you might want to filter, but fortunately it's not too 
hard to write a function to handle any specific type of file you need 
for both platforms.

I'll cover this in-depth at an upcoming article for revJournal.com soon, 
but here's a quick example to get you started:

function MyGetFile
  put "Select a document:" into tPrompt
  if the platform is "MacOS" then
   answer file tPrompt of type "MFIL" --< your file type
  else
   answer file tPrompt with filter "*.mfl" --< your file extension
  end if
  if it is empty then exit to top
  return it
end MyGetFile


-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev