My Prototype update!

[Thomas McGrath III]

Hello to everyone,

It has been awhile since I was able to let you all know my progress  
using Revolution as a RAD Tool (Rapid Application Development Tool)  
for a Cell Phone/PDA project.

Recap:
We had a Macromedia Director 'expert' do a prototype for us a year or  
two ago. It is a GUI for small screen handheld devices and smart  
phones. Anyway the further along we got in the project it seemed our  
MM Director guy was having difficulty getting us what we needed. It  
was either too difficult to do or was too difficult to comprehend and  
we needed to continually re-explain what we wanted. Whatever happened  
to 'trying' to figure out what the client wants rather than trying to  
explain how it can't be done that way? Anyway, We had a series of  
games that needed to be done to show our interface in a gaming  
scenario. After being told how difficult it would be a few times I  
decided to pull the plug on Director as a tool to get these  
prototypes done. I decided to tackle them in Revolution.

I was able to recreate the 'engine' to drive our system in just under  
a week (it took our MM Director guy several months) and was able to  
create (using that engine) eight games to demonstrate both the use of  
the engine and how our Interface works in a game environment in  
another week. Yep, that's right, in two weeks I was able to create a  
Database driven engine and a series of applications including an SMS  
application, an Application browser, a database editor, and eight  
different games. This really shows the power and usability of a  
product like Revolution especially compared to MM Director.

We have been using the prototype in Rev to demonstrate to prospective  
investors what our system is capable of doing and we have finally  
received a few hundred thousand dollars in funding and have acquired  
a couple of evangelists to our cause. We have developed an LLC and I  
am now part owner of the new company. We now are using the prototype  
to describe Use Case Scenarios in a visual form and to describe  
Demonstration Variances and our Scope of Work documents. We are  
working on a contract with some offshore developers to put our system  
on a series of smart phones. The prototype is being used to describe  
the Engineering Specifications for them.

I have been spending the last week and next week going over these  
documents and plan on having an Engineering Deliverable Milestones  
schedule and contract for this project. I have been asked to be in  
charge of the testing phase as well. We will be using an emulator for  
the phone environment we choose, to do this testing. We are planning  
a modular approach and hope to have an early release of a test  
application using our engine by March or April of 2006. We plan on  
using the test applications to demonstrate and sell our system to  
prospective phone/carrier/manufacturers.

Comments:
WoW, Revolution really made my job easier, It has been robust and  
simple and has out shined Director for this project. We can really  
use Revolution to further help us in this process of developing a  
working product on a phone/pda. However, It would have been 'REALLY'  
nice to be able to port the Rev project directly over to a windows CE  
smart phone/PDA environment. It would save us around fifty thousand  
dollars in development too. Actually if I could do that, there is a  
lucrative opportunity for me to produce games and applications for  
this company to use with their engine and provide a bit of money for  
me. I think Revolution re-writes the book on RAD Rapid Application  
Development and most of the technical people involved (Except the  
Director 'Guru") have been really impressed with Revolution  
especially our off-shore developers from India.

Complaints:
Unicode, Unicode, Unicode. ( which I was able to use the OS to paste  
into my Database but not use Rev's filtering commands and therefor  
made the Unicode not do able) And it was too late to include the web  
browser since I did not have altBrowser when I first started and  
there was a bug that I could not figure out in Panther so I skipped  
the browser in the end. (It would have and may yet be a very cool use  
of altBrowser if I can find the time to see if the bug is fixed and  
learn how to implement it)

Lastly, I would not have been able to learn, understand and complete  
any of this without the unlimited and useful help from everyone on  
this list. I formerly thank each and every one of you. Especially I  
would like to thank Richard, Dan, Jacque, Sarah, Malte, Chipp, Mark,  
Alex, Geoff, Eric, Ken, Scott, and Xavier too! for all of the help  
you guys and gals gave me in getting up to speed on using Transcript.  
(I am sure I missed someone that helped me so I apologize now)


Thank you all,

Tom McGrath

Applications Development Director/Part Owner
SCIconics, LLC
1000 Killarney Drive
Castle Shannon, PA 15234

Owner
Lazy River Software
220 Drake Road
Bethel Park, PA 15102

Computer and Application Development Consultant
Semantic Compaction Systems
1000 Killarney Drive
Castle Shannon, PA 15234