Newbie question

[Richard Gaskin]

Steve Jones wrote:

 > On May 4, 2010, at 9:35 AM, Colin Holgate wrote:
 >>
 >> On May 4, 2010, at 10:30 AM, Steve Jones wrote:
 >>
 >>> I see in RR that you put items in GROUPS to have them appear
 >>> on every card in a stack as opposed to SC where you put them
 >>> in the BACKGROUND.  I have a GROUP of items on a single card
 >>> in a stack. When the CREATE CARD command is issued in a handler,
 >>> a new card is created but the GROUP is not on it.  What might
 >>> I be doing wrong?
 >>
 >> Look in the inspector palette for the group, and see if its
 > "Behave like a background" box is checked.
 >
 > Aha - that was it.  Didn't even see that option.  No very intuitive.

Very little in computing is truly "intuitive".  Like driving it's easy 
enough to learn, but like driving there's some learning involved.

Rev's groups seem odd only if you've been using a more limited 
implementation such as the more HyperCard-compliant model in SC.

You nailed it here:

 > I guess there's more flexibility that way.

Lots.  With HC you have only one group/background per card, but with Rev 
you can have as many as you like.  They can be nested, and you can 
choose to share them across cards or not as you like.

Very, very flexible indeed.



PS: Rev ships with what I call "Anti-Learning Mode":  for all its 
emphasis on the so-called "English-like" syntax, by default they don't 
use the actual property names for things in the Inspector, instead using 
labels that are ostensibly even more English-like than "English-like". :)

When I'm teaching new users the first thing I suggest is that they go to 
Rev's Preferences and turn off Anti-Learning Mode:

At the top of the Prefs window in the first section there are two radio 
controls in a group labeled "Property labels are:" with the options 
being "Description of option" and "Name of RevTalk Property".  Click the 
latter.

In my experience it greatly accelerates learning to have the Inspector 
set to show the actual property name, so you can see in the UI the same 
tokens you'll later be typing in your scripts, reinforcing the learning 
of the language as you do layout work.

The property in question here is called "backgroundBehavior".  Off by 
default, when set to true newly created cards will have any such shared 
groups automatically placed on them.

You may also want to review the "place" and "remove" commands in the 
RevTalk dictionary, which allow you to place and remove shared groups on 
already-existing cards.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv