Rev and the iPad

[rand valentine]

I've been following the discussion a bit regarding Apple's policies that
affect the likelihood that RevMobile will ever find its way onto the iPhone
and iPad, and I appreciate the many perspectives offered, they've tempered
my own contempt for SJ a bit, though not enough for me to confer any
blessings. I'm wondering what is going to happen with our quite expensive
RevMobile licenses -- perhaps it's too early to tell, but if I can't program
for Apple mobile products, then I don¹t really have any use for RevMobile,
and I hope that Rev will simply allow me to transfer the cost of it to
license renewals of versions of Rev that DO run on Apple products, though
who knows when the proverbial wild hair will cause SJ to banish all but
Objective C for my Mac as well. RevMobile was priced quite expensively,
presumably under the assumption that it was the golden egg of Rev
programming products that was finally going to get me that Lamborghini
Countach. Now it's a brick, and we need to figure out what to do. We are all
very loyal to Rev and its wonderful staff, but something reasonable will
have to be done in the face of this disastrous development.

I love the comments about HyperCard, because I too was there, especially the
BAD stacks, which outnumbered GOOD stacks at least 50 to 1. I remember! I
haven't gone NEAR the pattern palette since! I am a university professor,
and did my dissertation research using HyperCard, a dialect survey of a
North American aboriginal language spoken over much of Canada and the upper
midwest of the U.S. HyperCard greatly enabled me to do REALLY GOOD research,
and I continue to use Rev in, well, revolutionary ways in documentary
linguistic work. I don't know what I'd use if it didn't exist, I use it
every day for some programming need I have. It's not perfect-- the biggest
problem for me is the lack of really transparent Unicode usage. But it is
REALLY good. I am a language teacher, too, and I've used Rev to make some
wonderful teaching tools, and that was my primary interest in using
RevMobile, so that I could develop simple language learning tools for my
students. I cannot effectively communicate my annoyance that someone can
program yet another bloodbath game with stick figures but I cannot use the
iPad to circulate language learning programs for a dying language because I
happen to use a program that SJ has decided to sort with the goats. This is
not an idle issue for me.

I also use FMTouch, a really cute implementation of part of FileMaker on the
iDevice. My impression is that they are in some way up a creek just as Rev
is regarding enabling third party access to the vaunted App Store. They have
a wiki discussing various programming/implementation issues and talk about
something called Application Provisioning, here

http://www.fmwebschool.com/reference/FMTouch_Reference#Application_Provision
ing

It seems that this would be relevant to just about anything we might to do
with deploying to an iDevice.

rand valentine