Positive Feedback

[Richmond Mathewson]

I am currently putting together a brace of programs for
fairly basic EFL learners to revise careers/jobs (what
the series of EFL textbooks I use, in an almost
vomit-making effort at over political correctness terms
'community helpers') and, while spending hours and
hours twiddling away with GIMP because I am an
extremely fussy so-and-so about the standard of graphics
in my programs, I am able to pop the actual programs
together in Runtime Revolution in "a brace of shakes"
as the saying goes.

Once I have assembled all the 'raw materials';

graphic elements
textual elements
multimedia elements

to produce a fully functioning standalone is normally
an extremely rapid and painless procedure.

While these programs are not 'rocket science' in terms
of programming, I tried the same with ToolBook and
Director in the past, and recently with HyperStudio, and really
got extremely 'bogged down' in silly little details that, if
they are there in Revolution take care of themselves
without my intervention. Quite apart from the fact that
these IDEs tie one down to specific platforms.

Whatever else my criticisms of Revolution may be, I will
always be grateful about the way it has made my work
so easy.

However . . . (well, face it, Richmond can never bite his tongue),
I don't think enough is being done to advertise Revolution to other
in the sector I work within. Meeting EFL 'colleagues' (unpleasant
word) round and about Plovdiv, Bulgaria [ and, in the Balkan
peninsular, the EFL industry is HUGE = big bucks ] I constantly get 'funny'
looks when I state that with Revolution I could teach all the EFL
teachers in Bulgaria how to put together quite respectable
programs for content delivery and reinforcement in a couple
of afternoons.  Mind you, I also get 'funny' looks when I see all the EFL
schools with Pentium IIIs sitting 'rotting' in the corners with
non-functioning Windows 98 on them and I suggest they wake them
up again with something like Xubuntu coupled with programs
written in Revolution.