Embarrassed Newbie

[J. Landman Gay]

DunbarX at aol.com wrote:

> The nice thing about a HC-like bg is that all cards already have it. To my 
> mind it offers an open playing field that can be accessed during development as 
> required, whenever new or existing objects seem to fit in that space better. 

Sometimes though you don't need any background. Rev doesn't require one, 
so you can just leave it off. If you need one, it's easy to create.

> The group concept itself, requiring that they must be placed like any other 
> object, ad hoc, ran up against the very small wall that I originally wrote about. 
> This is fine as far as it goes, and the fix, naturally derived from the 
> rev/HC common clay, is straightforward. The fact that a stack can have multiple 
> "bgs" is likely a powerful feature.

Very powerful. Picture a typical educational stack which has a title 
card, a second card to gather some demographics about the student, and 
then a series of sections, or "chapters", about a topic. This is a 
pretty common setup for educational material. There's a navigation 
panel, maybe with a clickable list for each chapter heading and "next" 
and "prev" buttons in it. Each "chapter" has a distinctive background.

In HC you'd create a new background for each chapter and you'd have to 
duplicate the navigation panel on each of them. If you made a change to 
the navigation panel in one place, you'd need to make the same change 
for each chapter background in the stack. The title and demographic 
cards would probably have empty, unused backgrounds because nothing on 
those cards needs to be shared.

In Rev, the title and demographic cards would have no background groups. 
The demographic card might use a few radio button groups to determine 
gender, interests, etc. about the student. Since these groups would not 
be shared, they would be card groups that live only on the demographic 
card. Again, no background required, and yet you still have the 
automatic radioBehavior that comes for free with groups.

The navigation panel would be shared by all but the first two cards. 
Changing anything in it will immediately be reflected on every card that 
uses it. Each chapter would have its own, second background group that 
was shared only by those cards in the chapter. Perhaps one or two cards 
in a single chapter need to share an image; easily done. Those two cards 
would have three backgrounds: the navigation panel, the chapter 
background, and the shared image.

And so on. Very powerful stuff.

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