Economics & Eye Candy

[Dan Shafer]

Gordon.....

While I sympathize with some of your feelings (while I continue to be  
my most productive self when using Rev and grinning from ear to ear  
watching my colleagues who use Python, Java, and Basic go through  
excruciating pains to do what I can do in seconds or minutes in my  
favorite tool!), this notion of integrating externals is one on which  
I have pretty strong opinions. (Yes, I know. That's unusual for me. NOT)

The problem, IMNSHO, isn't with Rev, it's with the fact that as far  
as I know there is no single method of creating and implementing  
externals that runs on all platforms. I may be wrong about that; DLLs  
may in fact be more cross-platform than they were last time I looked,  
particularly with the emergence of OS X. But I am pretty strongly  
opposed to Rev spending significant time and resources extending the  
capabilities of the program for *any* platform-specific  
functionality. And, FWIW, that includes when they do so for MY  
favorite platform, OS X. I'd have been delighted to see 2.6 fix a  
bunch more bugs and not implement CoreImage and DeepMask stuff. Now,  
I realize that in saying that I'm in a small minority and I also  
realize that the DeepMask stuff works cross-platform and will be a  
real boon as Longhorn emerges from its near-decade in cold storage.  
But my position remains the same: of all the development tools from  
which I can choose, only two that I know of -- Rev and Flash -- give  
me true cross-platform capability. And because I choose to work on a  
minority platform but want to be able to reach the majority platform,  
cross-platform is my personal number one feature in Rev. Anything  
that detracts from that is just in my way or an unnecessary appendage.

So if there is a way to facilitate the incorporation of cross- 
platform external routines relatively transparently and to give me a  
Transcript-level way of dealing with them, I'm happy to see it  
implemented even though I have yet to need such capability in the  
dozens of things I've written. But if supporting externals must be  
done for a specific platform -- or, almost as badly, differently for  
each platform -- then I'm in favor of Rev passing on that and fixing  
more of the bugs we still have to work around.


On Jun 7, 2005, at 1:10 PM, Gordon Webster wrote:

> still no real
> arrays, still no bridge to the vast world of shared
> libraries that would allow me to integrate external
> functionality into rev and save me having to either
> reinvent the wheel or spend my time writing C wrappers
>



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Co-Chair
RevConWest '05
June 17-18, 2005, Monterey, California
http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest