"Seamless Tiles Generator 2" updated

[J. Landman Gay]

-= JB =- wrote:
> I have only been using Revolution for less than a year now and before
> that I used hyperCard.  I know about MetaCard but I thought it was
> replaced by Rev.  So where do I get the MetaCard IDE and after I
> get it how do I install it properly?

You can download the MC IDE setup stack, and it will download the latest 
IDE for you and install your copy of the Rev engine into it:

<http://www.hyperactivesw.com/revnet/metacard_setup.zip>

The process is all automated. I suggest including the Rev dictionary 
option at the bottom of the setup card, since the native MC dictionary 
is years out of date.

> 
> I have noticed others on the list mention they use MetaCard too.  Will
> someone please explain why people use MetaCard even though they
> keep using the latest version of Rev.

MC IDE is just a very stripped-down set of stacks that allow a different 
way of working with the engine. The primary difference is that the IDE 
is very minimal -- for example, there is no user interface for most of 
the properties you see in Rev's property inspector. Instead, a minimal 
property inspector lets you set the most-used properties, but for others 
you need to know they exist and use the message box to set them (or 
install a third-party or original property inspector of your own.) The 
object browser offers less functionality than the application browser in 
Rev -- it shows only the current card objects (but on the other hand, 
that's usually all I'm interested in.) There is no interface at all for 
many things, such as removing a substack, deleting a stack from RAM, 
most preferences, etc. For these things you use the message box and you 
must know the commands. You can write your own plugins to do what some 
of the Rev IDE does if you like. All the MC IDE stacks are similarly 
terse. They expect that you already know the capabilities of the engine 
and are comfortable working with the command line. The engine was 
originally written for Linux/Unix and the MC IDE reflects this level of 
comfort.

I frequently work in both IDEs depending on the stack I'm working with. 
For example, Rev tracks when a field has changed and puts up its "do you 
want to save" dialog if you change any text in a field. MC IDE does not. 
For those stacks that routinely change text temporarily in a field, I 
always launch MC because I don't want the interruption of dismissing the 
spurious dialog. (I have a small word processing stack, for example, 
that works with text files. I don't want the actual word processing 
stack marked as "dirty" just because I typed temporary text into the 
main field.)

While the disadvantage (or maybe it's an advantage) is that you need to 
have a good grasp of what the engine can do and the UI is minimal, the 
advantages are that there is almost no interference from the IDE at all. 
A tiny frontscript and a small backscript are the only insertions. The 
IDE does not get in the way, and you can be fairly certain that if you 
see a bug in the MC IDE it is more likely to be an engine bug than an 
IDE problem. The freedom to do what you want without interference is 
much greater in the MC IDE, with the caveat that with freedom comes 
responsibility -- you can more easily lose your work or wreck the stack 
because the protections that the Rev IDE offers aren't there.

For my workflow, there are advantages to both IDEs and I switch 
frequently between them.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com