RevStore

[J. Landman Gay]

Richard Gaskin wrote:
> When people look at a tool like Rev they 
> want to see there's a sizable afternarket as an indicator of viability. 
>   So it benefits RunRev more than anyone else to improve the 
> presentation of third-party offerings all over their site.

But with caution. I'm in favor of keeping it out of the spotlight until 
there are many more apps available, hundreds hopefully. A few meager 
offerings is not inspiring.

And they have to be quality offerings. As someone who had to review and 
release hundreds of HC stacks to the AOL libraries, I know that 99% of 
what came in was pure crap. Because HC was so accessible, everyone 
thought they were a developer. Avoidance of even the suggestion of a HIG 
was the norm. Radio buttons used as checkboxes or pushbuttons ("because 
I like how they look,") menus missing or out of order ("I don't need an 
Edit menu,") known commercial app icons (MacWrite) used for private 
stack purposes ("go cd images",) you name it. Virtually everything about 
these stacks was wrong. Outsiders scoffed. Rightfully.

And then there were the kids. I wavered between disgust and delight. 
Their stacks were invariably flip card animations done with crude line 
drawings, generally on topics humorous to nine year olds. "Kill Barney" 
was very popular, we had probably a dozen of those, not counting the 
rejected ones. The weapon of choice varied from guns (all models) to 
swords and knives; one stick man farted old Barney to death. We had to 
make a separate library for these and tag them with editorial code words 
like "simple line drawings" so that everyone else would know not to 
download them.

This lack of professionalism in HC stacks was one of the reasons it was 
rarely regarded as a serious tool, and it gave HC a bad name generally. 
The number of really good stacks was pretty small. Unfair as it is, the 
quality of the output often reflects on the tools used rather than the 
authors. If there is ever a Rev app store, it needs to have lots of 
files, all of which pass a certain standard of professionalism. That 
means someone has to check and verify every submission, which would open 
a whole other can of worms.

I confess though, in retrospect I really do wish I'd saved a copy of 
"Man Gets Beheaded By a Ceiling Fan." You had to be there.

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