W(h)ither Rev??? - (was sundry recent rants, with ever-increasing parentheses and unending tree branches)

[Mike Harland]

Having read the latest Mathewson v. Kane mini-rant, I thought it was  
about time somebody long-in-the-tooth, white-haired and Gandalf-like  
synthesised a few things. As a persistent, silent reader for many  
years on this list, I assume I can be allowed one message of  
(positively) negative comment before I am banned or threatened with  
legal action!

Going back to all the HyperCard nostalgia, as I remember it, HC was  
intended to become another 'atom' of QuickTime to supply the  
interactive multi-platform programming element - but Apple were weak  
at the time and somebody powerful and threatening from outside killed  
that great development idea off. So we developers all reluctantly had  
to abandon HC, fork out big money and migrate to Director/Flash/etc.  
to make our software multi-platform, get it onto the web and into the  
global market. Instead of an 'Open Source'-like, killer-platform that  
would have been QTHC, we ended up with all the present HC-->Rev  
clones, practically divorced from the main multi-platform UI of the  
web browser, and with QT as an under-developed dying duck, losing out  
to Real and MS. They all remain as small or shrinking applications  
with an ambiguous identity in a now much wider web-based (soon to be  
mobile-based) world.

Rev tries hard to be a commercial company with a proprietary app, but  
it still suffers from the same ill-defined usage identity that HC  
did. It has unfortunately alienated many of the 'academic' users who  
made HC what it was, 'Open Source' in all but name, believing that  
these 'freeby people' were the cause of its demise (even if people s  
had by then been forced to start paying a fair amount for it!!) while  
the truth is that HC failed because Apple were unable to make it  
multiplatform and web-embeddable.

Rev continues to contemplate its own navel with all its talk of  
'pros' on this list, while consistently looking down its nose at the  
so-called hobbyist, newby or daft-headed academic (consider this:  
would that 'million dollar app' have been made if it were not through  
the cooperation of an academic with a bright idea and a brilliant Rev  
programmer??). The list is mainly filled with posts from self-styled  
'experts' who are actual investors in the company and make their  
living from its success or failure and therefore are biassed by  
definition. Their comments prove nothing to me and merely try to  
overshadow others with their barrage of positive messages.

Having been in at the beginning of the hypertext 'revolution' (almost  
2 decades ago, before CDs and the web even existed) and already  
building multimedia educational apps in HC and ToolBook, I have ever  
since been waiting for the multi-platform successor to bring me back  
to the user-friendly, universal app we all ('pro' or 'hobbyist')  
deserve. But I am still waiting for Rev to prove itself as a stable  
and reliable vehicle for delivering software in a global market - I  
stopped updating a year ago and certainly won't be continually  
updating every year until it does exactly what Richmond Mathewson  
says and sorts out a stable, 'virtually' bug-free version. But, as  
Scott Kane says, if things continue as they are I expect global  
events and other orgs will have overtaken Rev by then ...

Wake up Rev management/programming team!  Open up to a cooperative,  
community-based  strategy which welcomes criticism and innovation and  
is openly friendly to its user base - evolve, mature and learn to be  
flame proof! Allow people to produce Rev advice sites and repository  
sites or to form non-commercial user groups, instead of saying "No,  
we'll set this up, since we know what we are doing and can do it  
better", and then effectively strangle these initiatives by always  
failing to come up with the goods because you obviously don't have  
the resources. Control-freakery will merely leave you as a small  
struggling company in a small commercial backwater, instead of being  
the globally recognised and commercially successful HC/MC successor  
you ought to be by now.

I suggest non-flame-resistant 'experts' and others who may feel  
aggrieved at what I have said should contemplate the positive message  
intended in this comment, before blinkeredly concentrating on their  
own personal ego defences - now and again we all have to suffer some  
unintended unfair criticism to see the error of our ways, and I am  
quite willing to be the first to accept that what I have said here  
may contain some  ...

End of one-off, non-continuing comment!

Mike