A maybe not so stupid question

[Romain Lafourcade]

I've started working with Rev 6 month ago because I wanted to make an
on-screen "book" that looked like a "real" app.

The very first version of Black Book Browser (that I've put on some CDs)
looked quite good and worked well on Mac OS Classic and Windows.
It made me think about making a customisable version of it and, why not,
distribute it as a shareware.

I've looked at my archives and such sites as download.com or macupdate and
found no app matching what I want to do. PhotoShow looks like an ugly flash
movie and is very slow and other utilities like KPT QuickShow are way too
simple...

The original project was to create a "Builder" and a separate "Browser" that
would be distributed together. If I wanted to make a cross-platform distro
(Mac OS Classic + Mac OS X + Windows) its size would be up to 10 or 12 MB,
too much for a quite simple application.

So I decided to build separately the OS specific "Builders" and "Browsers"
allowing the user to download exactly what he needs.

Here comes the topic of my message : the size of the distribution.

The Revolution engine weight about 2 MB meaning that even the simplest app
would weight at least 2MB. It's OK for a "large" app like Photoshop or
whatever but what about VERY simple things like an utility that batch-rename
folders ?

I assume that the Rev engine is made so it is able to translate ALL the
transcript terms into some non-human-readable machine code.
The question is : Why put the whole transcript/machine dictionary into the
final built if it make use of only a part of the language ?

Maybe that could be possible to offer the Rev user 2 distinct "Build
distrib" options :

- a "Development build" that could be used for testing purpose, using the
regular engine

- a "Final build", this one being slower, puting into the built app ONLY the
useful transcript/code translations

- or maybe if the process is not that slower, only the second option ?

This could even help make Rev-made apps even faster than they are...

Please remember this post for next year's "most stupid question of the year
award"...

Romain