Rev Documentation [WAS: Launch another app from my standalone]

[Bernard Devlin]

I have to say, I think the Revolution documentation is pretty good.
Obviously there are many things available in Rev that one forgets if
one is not using Rev almost every day.  However, whenever I return to
using Rev after some weeks away from it, I find that I never spend
more than a couple of minutes searching through the dictionary to find
what I want. The Dictionary is an extraordinary device for me - it
offers complete information, but does so without making me wade
through lots of stuff I don't want.  People have produced versions of
the Dictionary that perform faster or take up less screen space, and
they have been welcome additions (although these days I mostly just
stick with the ordinary Dictionary).

I came from a non-Hypercard background, and when I first started to
learn Rev there was only the documentation stacks that come with Rev
(there is more now - the User Guide, and the videos).  I felt I was
really missing something so I bought some hypercard books and they
helped a lot.  I bought the two volumes of the Danny Goodman book
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-HyperCard-2-2-Handbook/dp/0679791221/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251725810&sr=8-3),
for about the price it is being sold for on Amazon.  I also bought
Jeanne Devoto's book on Hyperscript.

I don't have the Goodman book any more (I gave it to a friend who I
introduced to Rev).  And I think that it was the Hyperscript book that
was more helpful, but that book doesn't even seem to be available on
amazon at all.  The Goodman book provided a general overview of the
Hypercard/Message path, but once I'd got on top of that, then I found
myself referring to the Hyperscript book more.  Of course, since those
books are quite old and for a very similar but also slightly different
tool to Rev, there are some places where they would be misleading to
new user to Rev.

Does the PDF of the User Guide that comes with Rev not help?  I would
think that that would serve as a good general introduction/orientation
to new users or infrequent users.  There are times when I might have
been away from Rev for some months, and I would find myself turning to
the User Guide in order to remind myself of something (usually to do
with custom properties/custom property sets!)

The 'cookbook' existed with the Rev documentation from about version
1.1.1 to about 2.7.  It wasn't really a list of the many alternative
ways to do things, so much as single examples answering questions of
the 'how would I do...' variety.

I'm not sure it would really benefit new users to have a cookbook that
showed several of the many different ways to do things.  But maybe the
old cookbook ought to be revived.  If only because the idea of such
easy recipes' shows what can be achieved in Rev.  One of the friends I
introduced to Rev stopped using after a few months, because she
couldn't see how to make any use of it.  She ended up choosing
Filemaker instead - it seemed that the fact that Filemaker was a more
limited/more specific framework for development suited her better.

Bernard



On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Adrian Williams<adrian at clubtype.co.uk> wrote:
> Not coming from a HyperCard background does not prepare one for Rev's
> principles.
> If there are different ways to achieve the same thing, then let's have some
> cross-referenced examples.
> I've seen talk of a 'cookbook' on this list. Perhaps it is time for someone
> to captalise on that?
>
> Like the Internet, when something is too flexible, it's a job to know where
> to start.
> Three ways to accomplish a few commonly used tasks may be enough to
> introduce novices the various processes.
> Three ways to "Launch an application"
> Three ways to "Track the path to a file"
> Three ways to...
>