Newbie

[Richard Gaskin]

dunbarx wrote:

> How do you live without Rinaldi?

Rinaldi's a Rev developer, so he's still with us.  In fact, he's even 
presented at some of the Rev conferences.

Check out the site for the Rinaldi Collection:

    Note to Revolution Users

    Transcript being so fast, some externals has been rewritten
    using it.  Those are now checkmarked in a new "RR" column
    appearing in the XCMD Collection list.  You simply have to
    copy the script to your stack in order to have all your
    existing calls to the external work identically, including
    original parameters.

    Keep on HyperCarding, SuperCarding, Directoring, MetaCarding...

    and most of all : Revolutioning, which is FINALLY the right
    HyperCard successor!

<http://rinaldicollection.free.fr/>


With HC I could barely get through the day without relying on externals, 
and when SuperCard came along at last I had real scrolling windows with 
scroll bars, integrated color support, native dialogs, and other things 
I used to have to work around with externals in HC, but I still had to 
use externals for many things like heavy text parsing/sorting, resource 
manipulation, etc.

When I first started porting projects to Rev back in '98, I was 
concerned that I'd have to rewrite externals twice, once for the Rev API 
again for use on Windows.  Wasn't looking forward to that.

What I found instead was that I don't need them at all:  the 
functionality of every external I'd ever used back then was relatively 
easy to rewrite natively in Rev, which not only saved me a heck of a lot 
of time but also means it all runs on all supported platforms - even Linux.

Rinaldi's right:  Transcript is so fast that once you get the hang of 
using "sort", "filter", "repeat for each...", and other things not found 
in native HyperTalk you'll likely be as pleasantly surprised as I was at 
how well you can do on your own, at last liberated from the need to keep 
jumping over to a C compiler for basic tasks.

And then you'll start using things like window transparency and custom 
shapes, object transparency, the new built-in gradients, integrated QTVR 
support, one-line HTTP and FTP commands, and a whole lot more, and the 
biggest problem you'll have is all the other things in your life that 
don't get attended to while you find yourself playing with Rev all day. :)


Here's a simple trick that you may enjoy if you haven't come across it 
before - put this in the Message Box and hit Return:

  go (decompress(url "http://www.fourthworld.net/revnet/RevNet.rev.gz"))

In one line it does the following:

1. Contacts my server and downloads RevNet.rev.gz

2. It's in a compressed gzip format for quick delivery,
    so the built-in decompress function expands it.

3. Opens and displays that stack from memory.

(You can also access that stack from within Rev using 
Development->Plugins->GoRevNet.)

There are other goodies in that stack, such as a list of other stacks 
that can be downloaded from within it, an index to the handy Rev tips 
from Ken Ray's site, and more, much of it dynamically pulled from 
different sites around the 'net -- all in native Transcript.

Built-in compression and one-liner Internet calls are among my favorite 
things about Rev, opening up whole new worlds for delivering 
centrally-managed software over the 'net.

If that sort of thing sparks your interest, check out this article on 
Richard Herz' Reactor Lab, a distributed courseware system made with Rev:
<http://www.revjournal.com/features/reactorlab.html>

The possibilities are endless....

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com