idea: Contest and promoting Rev to the world

[John Ridge]

on 20/6/05 3:42 pm,  Jim Ault wrote :

I have an idea for the coding contest, now and in the future.
Note: currently I am starting two businesses and cannot participate, so this
is a suggestion for others.

Dan Shafer made the statement in his keynote that one of the cool things
about Hypercard was that it came with example stacks that let you see what
it could do and look under the hood.  If Rev is going to make real money and
thrive, it has to appeal to customers outside the professional developers.

With that in mind, could one of the 'contest' areas be making the original
collection of stacks from Apple into Rev stacks that might include a section
on 'how they did that'?  Of course, beyond that, many of the powerful things
you could do with Rev today.

I would prefer that the Rev team work on fixing bugs than trying to come up
with a set of demo stacks.

Any interest?  I think it would help promote our favorite development
environment.
Perhaps this could get a little section in theJournal each edition.

Jim Ault
Las Vegas

***********************************

I very much agree, Jim. I listened to Dan's speech, and thought he was
absolutely right. He's said it before, of course, and I blame myself for not
taking him seriously enough. I have been thinking for a while about putting
some real money into a prize contest for Rev developers of all levels of
skill and experience. This looks like a very good focus.  I should emphasise
that this is quite separate from Bjornke's coding contest, which I think is
a great idea - but directed at a different goal?

Maybe there are political difficulties - what is RunRev's attitude to
initiatives that, to be effective,  would require their support but would
not be under their control? I suspect they are pretty laid back about this,
as use-revolution itself implies - a great way to get users to do the
support work! But as Dan also said, a little more involvement from them
would make a great difference (I note that Mark has been on-list several
times lately, which is really good). Anything of the sort we are talking
about would have to be part of the free download from RunRev, and to that
extent "official". Is that a problem (a) for RunRev (b) for potential
contributors?

Sarah has also written about this recently. It's hard to recall now just how
revolutionary (OK!) Hypercard felt back in '87. But my recollection was that
you could suddenly do really neat things that looked way cool, using very
simple tools and scripts (actually, I don't think we said "way cool" back
then, but you know what I mean!).

I'm not sure that is so easy today. Instead of crude B&W graphics we must
nowadays  incorporate (for example) those wonderful buttons that Chipp
Walters is making at Altuit. There are just a whole lot more GUI features
that must be covered (sliders, progressbars, colour icons, players...), and
of course they all need to be genuinely x-platform (how many flavours of
Unix do you need to test on?).

Error-catching seems to me a much bigger deal than it was with Hypercard -
and a demo stack just has to be bullet-proof. Unfortunately (I gather from
real developers) this is where a major part of the hard work of development
goes - the parts that are not fun or glamorous...

Would people be interested in doing such work? Would new users get enough
out of the results? Do you remember Bill Atkinson's original Rolodex address
book? Each card had the little holes at the bottom for the metal thingummies
to go through... What would a 2005 version look like? My first thought is
that if it doesn't look grreat on WinXP then forget it. I'm impressed by
"Scripters Scrapbook" - in 1988 I wrote, and still use, a similar gadget -
but my GUI is just pathetic in comparison. How much effort is that worth, in
this context?

For me this is a real dilemma. I would love to commission or sponsor some
beautiful software - I mean literally beautiful, as in the Tres Riches
Heures du Duc de Berry, whatever the 2005 equivalent is - but I'm also
concerned that Revolution out of the box is not, as Dan put it, "seductive".
Maybe these goals are not compatible?

Apologies for going on at such length. I'm thinking aloud, which is usually
not a good idea when people are listening! Perhaps off-list feedback is
preferable...