RevMobile first impressions?

Sarah Reichelt sarah.reichelt at gmail.com
Thu Mar 4 21:11:46 EST 2010


On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Marian Petrides <mpetrides at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I'd love to hear your more detailed impressions, Sarah, and I bet others would too.  Meanwhile, thanks for the early preview!

Here is some more info:

Set your stack's font to Helvetica 14, the backColor to "200,200,200"
and the look & feel to Motif to get the best preview of how it will
look on the iPhone without any skinning.

A multi-card stack works fine and moving into & out of sub-stacks works fine.

Not all text decoration works: there are no fonts and you can't
specify bold or italic, but all the other text styles work and you can
set colors.

I have used the photo picker and it works really well, but don't leave
an image on screen if you leave that card or the app usually crashes.

Images are a bit crashy - sometimes they work, other times they crash.

File handling: I have been able to list files in the app bundle,
create a new one and display it, download an image file and save it,
download a web page and show the htmlText.

File paths: you can get the defaultFolder which gives the full folder
to the app in my Library. Getting the filename of my stack gives a
much shorter path, with the app bundle being the root folder. I
haven't worked out yet how to save a file to the app's Documents
folder.

iPhone specific commands: I have tested the command that accesses the
photo library (& would do the camera if I was using a real iPhone) and
they work really well. Shaking & multi-touch all seem fine, although
on the simulator I haven't actually been able to multi-touch.
If you shake when typing in a text field, you get a dialog saying that
there is nothing to undo, so the shake has been correctly linked to
the undo mechanism, but the actual undo is not operational yet.

Rotation: seemingly not implemented yet, although the handbook
mentions that they cause the stack to get a resizeStack message. I
haven't been able to detect this, so I have no idea how they plan to
implement rotation. I tried activating the accelerometer but I can't
test that without installing on a real iPhone. It didn't make any
difference to the rotation - you still just see all the controls
turned sideways. I even tried changing to a wide stack to see if that
would help, but it didn't make any difference.

So basically, although it all looks weird, there is an awful lot of
Rev that just works. Images are the most flaky things I have
discovered.
As is usual with iPhone apps and Rev apps, errors don't make a fuss,
although the app can just quit quietly if something weird happens.

As regards future revMobile programming, the main things I will be
looking for are the native look & feel, rotation handling and better
image handling. Of these, the rotation is the most important as I need
to know how this will work in order to be able to plan my development.
The look & feel will not stop me developing, but you couldn't release
an iPhone app that looks like it's running under X11 :-)

Image handling is crucial because it has caused a lot of app crashes
in my tests.

Adding an icon to your app is super-easy. You just make a 57 x 57 png
file and tell revMobile the plugin. When the app installs, the iPhone
rounds the corners and adds the cool lighting effect.

If anyone would like me to test any aspect in particular, just let me know.

Cheers,
Sarah



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