Newbie Questions from a ToolBook Developer

[Thomas J McGrath III]

John,

I am new to Revolution but spent years developing in SuperCard. I 
started using REV in late October and have creates a marketing CD for a 
third party that is cross platform in just two months. I can say that 
REV seems solid on both WIN and Mac as far as system differences go. 
The only gotchas that I have seen are mostly in my own lack of 
understanding for "One tool" and one stack to work on both systems. A 
lot of pre planning is needed to deal with the visual issues of both 
platforms.

Rev does have a few gotchas within it's own IDE that I believe are 
getting worked on as we speak and yes I have had to learn quickly how 
to get around them.

My problem areas were:
	Treating groups correctly. In my case OVER correctly. :-)
	Text formatting for both platforms. And inconsistent issues within 
REV. - This is being worked on.
	Dealing with systems that don't have Quicktime. - More of a 
understanding issue
	GUI differences on both platforms.
	New functions and syntax from what I was used to.
	Relative paths and defaultFolder. - there is a fix for in development.

I have learned quickly and feel very comfortable in a short time.

I downloaded Every stack I could find online and read every line of 
code in them. I still go back and open one or two a day and 'rip' them 
apart for understanding.

I don't know about number 2. and 3. is in the Groups. P.S. if you don't 
make the group first before you make new cards then it won't be 
included on each new card after the fact. I just right a button to 
repeat for number of cards and paste. Then before I hit the button I do 
a copy of the grouped objects. It does not seem to cause any adverse 
affects having to do this. I wish there were a way to create a 
'background' element. However if you already have a background group on 
all cards you can add to this group after the fact and the new object 
within this group will be included in all cards that have that 
background group.

HTH

Tom

On Dec 21, 2003, at 7:53 PM, John Ballard wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I've been developing courseware with ToolBook for about 7 years, but 
> I'm a
> brand new user to Runtime Revolution.
>
> I'm excited about the cross-platform possiblities. I'm ultimatly 
> looking for
> a second development tool and possibly something to switch to for 
> full-time
> development.
>
> If anyone can help me with the following concerns, It'd be much 
> appreciated.
>
> 1. Are there any examples of large-scale distributions of anything 
> created
> with Runtime Revolution? Specifically, I'm looking to see if there are 
> any
> "gotcha" distribution issues, say some minor conflict that would pop 
> up on
> Windows XP Home with a certain type of video card. The applications I 
> build
> get distributed to many thousands so I have to look far down the road. 
> I'm
> not asking this question as anything against Runtime Revolution's
> stability--it's just that ToolBook is riddled with "gotchas" that have 
> taken
> me half a decade to find and workaround. Just want to know if it's a
> similiar experience here.
>
> 2. Is there any way to dock all of the toolbars in the development
> environment to make it more of a one-window application. I"m trying the
> program out in Windows, but will also try it out in OSX soon. I 
> understand I
> can edit the development-environment stacks, but this is a bit 
> ambitious
> since I just got started. :-)
>
> 3. Is there such a thing as a "background" or a "master 
> page/stack/card" or
> a "shared card" in Runtime Revolution? I'm looking for a way to put
> something like a "next" button on this instead of having 200 copies of 
> the
> same "next" button on 200 cards.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help provided,
> John Ballard
>
> _______________________________________________
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> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
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>
>

Macintosh PowerBook G-4 OSX 10.3.1, OS 9.2.2, 1.25 GHz, 512MB RAM, Rev 
2.1.2


Advanced Media Group
Thomas J McGrath III	• 2003 •	3mcgrath at adelphia.net
220 Drake Road, Bethel Park, PA 15102