runrev 4.0 - kudos and a gripe

[Bill Marriott]

Hi Sean,

A few thoughts on your comments:

1) Drop shadows, etc., may not seem like much, but in an era where you have 
both Mac OS X and Vista/7 putting them around windows, etc., it's awfully 
nice -- more than nifty -- to be able to put glows around things 
programmatically because you can create a sense of depth and professionalism 
consistent with the OS. It will now be super-easy to have shadow and glows 
to enhance the user experience, for example with mouseovers, button hilites, 
and "picking up" objects that you are manipulating. And it's also useful for 
the revWeb plug-in content people will be creating, since the visual appeal 
is so important. It's a great workflow enhancement, too, because it obviates 
the need to create these effects in a separate drawing program.

2) These features are not added at the "expense" of a new field that has 
enhanced text formatting. I'm not going to say they were "easy" to add, but 
they are considerably more straightforward than reworking the field object. 
The field object, as you can imagine, is wired into everything. Adding 
something like "set the dropShadow of graphic 1 to true" is one thing; 
adding tab stop alignment is something altogether different, because there 
are lots of implications for the engine, the IDE, the language syntax, 
existing stacks, etc. We do have a plan for enhanced text formatting in 
fields and have been working toward that under the hood for a while now. It 
will come in time, and we want to do it right.

2.5) The data grid is not not a replacement for this feature, but it in the 
meantime it significantly enhances the data presentation abilities of Rev 
because it addresses many of the limitations that prevented people from 
using Rev for data-intensive solutions.

3) Critically important to the long-term success of Rev is having more 
people speak the language. Getting our Web story together in the cohesive 
way it's taking shape will enable us to do this. Although we may not be 
enabling people to recreate Word, we are empowering potentially millions of 
people to rediscover Web authoring and "get things done" because we offer a 
single language that can be used for the desktop, the server, and Web 
multimedia/tools across Mac, Windows, and Linux.

No one else does that. No one.

It is a unified and comprehensive platform that will allow Rev developers to 
create not just casual Web content (such as animations, simulations and 
games) but innovative new products, n-tier client/server apps, and hosted 
solutions, not to mention dramatically expanding their market and easing 
distribution. Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are struggling to get 
their Web-to-desktop story right; we already have that, and it's 
considerably easier and more accessible that their offerings.

4) The revServer technology will be available for installation on one's own 
hardware/hosting in the future. There will be a free version and a paid 
version. We are still working things out on that front, so I cannot be more 
specific. In the meantime, we have a very affordable option for the public 
to take advantage of these capabilities today, with their own domains, etc. 
And it's quite functional despite its "pre-release" status. Unlike other 
server technologies at this price range we have a very nice integrated 
authoring environment with a code editor, script manager, debugger, and 
variable watcher. It's leaps and bounds ahead of where we used to be with 
the old CGI engine, and I've seen some projects people have done that have 
just knocked my socks off. I might mention that the performance is 
absolutely phenomenal compared with PHP and alternatives. If on-Rev and 
revServer don't give you goose bumps, I don't know what will.

5) The visual effects are not the only new features in Rev 4.0. We didn't 
have time to get to this in the Webinar, but there will be a new externals 
interface which is very exciting because it will allow for exchange of 
binary data and arrays, as well as passing pointers so data doesn't have to 
be copied and externals operate much more quickly and efficiently. This 
opens up amazing new possibilities, including the potential for a 
third-party solution to your concerns. There is an in-depth session on this 
with our chief technology officer at the RunRevLive.09 conference.

In short, Rev 4.0 (along with revServer) will be our most significant 
release ever. It comes as giant leap after two years of steady, step-by-step 
advances. I personally see it as the most exciting news since the 
availability of MetaCard as a cross-platform solution for xTalk. This is not 
to say a new field is unimportant, but hopefully this post explains that 
this is about much more than just a pretty new logo.

- Bill


"Shao Sean" <shaosean at wehostmacs.com> wrote in 
message news:0421BB33-D464-4CC3-872B-55C577CE873C at wehostmacs.com...
> kudos
> - web plugin
> - server-side scripting (and maybe some day it will be released to  the 
> public)
> - photoshop-like effects
>
> while i did think that the real-time drop shadow and other Photoshop- like 
> effects were nifty I do not see why they were added over a  feature like a 
> new text field.. during the webinar it was mentioned  that "you can make 
> any kind of application in runrev" but the fact  that one can not even 
> duplicate WordPad or TextEdit is kind of sad..
>
> i do like the new logo though ^_^
>
> -Sean
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