Andy's comments and positioning...

[opus.species at wanadoo.fr]

> From: Dan Shafer <revdan at danshafer.com>
> So the education market is crucial, but it takes years to show an
> impact in the market.

My job is to produce educational CD-ROM, point of information and web 
sites. But i was appointed to teach multimedia programming for technicians 
(20-22 years old) and to post-graduate (23-25 years old) in the Sorbonne 
university in Paris.

Just my findings :

- my students didnt want to learn Metacard, they wanted to learn Director 
and Flash because they thought that they needed on their Curriculum the 
"best known professional tool". If we want to promote Revolution in these 
educational market, we need to say that Revolution is a very high level 
professional tool. All the arguments "it is also hobbyist oriented", "it 
is very easy to learn", "it is cheap" are counterproductive.
It is easy to explain to students that Director is an old fashioned 
product (Macromedia knows that and that's why they are relooking 
Director), but it is impossible not to teach Flash.

- Price was not a main concern.
The university had money to buy licences. From the university point of 
view, a good deal is "the professional product cost 1000$, that's OK, for 
the laboratory we need 10 copies with a 90% rebate". I guess that a 
classroom licence at 1000$ is better than 10 educational licences at 
100$ or 20 at 50$...
Anyway the students do not pay the license for their home computer ; they 
use "cracked" software ; the more expensive was the cracked software, the 
best for them ; they have better a 1000$ cracked software than a 50$ legal 
one. All microsoft, macromedia and adobe know that ; from a marketing 
point of view it is an investment to let students use cracked software 
because... as soon as they go in the professional life, the former 
students buy professional licences for the professional tools (in fact 
they at least pay for the upgrade of their cracked software :-).

- for non-english-speaking students, today, the "javascript" syntax = the 
"flash" syntax = the "." syntax = the "ECMA" syntax = "the standard syntax 
for programming" = is not more difficult than the xtalk syntax.
It is the same to teach and to learn "the property of myObjetc" than 
"myObject.property". The argument xTalk is easy was true 10 years ago, no 
more today.
I am sure of that even for 12-15 years french speaking kids ; i do not 
know for english-speaking kids.

- when we did produce real product, some of my students could experience 
and compare xTalk, Lingo and actionScript. For some projects they feel 
that Metacard was much more powerfull and much more easy than Flash ; on 
other projects they feel the contrary. Why ?

- as i said the problem is not the syntax. Today students have anyway to 
learn the "." syntax. And most of us on this list have to work with both 
syntaxes because we all need to use langages as javascript.

- the problem is the "object model". In the card metaphor, it is very 
simple to build cards and to put pre-existing objects on the cards. In 
Flash you can create your own objetcs (very fine and powerfull for a 
programmer !) but you are always confused between working with the object 
itself or with its instanciation on the screen.
The metaphor of Flash is much more "object oriented" than the metaphor of 
xCard. That's fine for the programmer, but designers or creators can 
express themselfs much easely with the card metaphor.
In fact the only students who preferred work with Flash than with Metacard 
where students who where more attracted by animation than by programming.
Some students where also happy with Flash because they downloaded sample 
animations from the web and just had to customize to their needs.

- if i had to design "the best creative environment for students from 12 
to 25", i would say :
* as a core engine MC or Revolution because they let express the 
creativity through an intuitive metaphor
* the xTalk set of objects, properties and functions because it is very 
powerfull, but the langage must evolve to allow both syntaxes, xTalk and 
ECMA
* Revolution must be able to embedd all medias = Quicktime (done), HTML 
(done via altBrowser.dll), Flash (native !), VideoPlayer, 3D player ; that 
could be done if Revolution can use all the plugin made for IExplorer and 
Mozilla.
* It is a hazardeous way to compare Flash and Revolution ; but it is easy 
to explain "Revolution is superior to Flash beacuse Revolution can embedd 
Flash".

Revolution appears today as the tool for the Macintosh community.
The argument "The Mac community was in difficulty since Hypercard died and 
because they need to deliver cross-platform : revolution is the solution" 
is a good one for MacWorld or AppleExpo, but not a good one for Windows or 
Linux users.

I would prefer an argument "Revolution, the professional tools what gives 
to you the best of the Mac, the best of Windows and the best of Linux".
It is easy to explain that Revolution give the "best of the Mac" from the 
*creativity* point of view.
It is easy to explain that Revolution give the "best of windows" from a 
*business* point of view because it allows to deliver to the 95% of 
windows users, faster and cheappier than with windows-only tools.
It is easy to explain that Revolution give the "best of linux" from a 
*technical* point of view because it can work as a CGI engine of Linux Web 
servers.

That was my 2 cents :-)

Claude Lemmel