Constellation's Great, But the Rev IDE Doesn't Suck

David Burgun dburgun at dsl.pipex.com
Tue Oct 18 13:26:16 EDT 2005


>On Oct 18, 2005, at 8:36 AM, David Burgun wrote:
>
>>I mean I've been using RunRev now for about 2 years, but still:
>>
>>1.  The debugger refuses to obey breakpoints.
>I see this sporadically as well. I wish I could find a pattern as 
>then I'm sure RunRev could and would fix it.

I have even had it refuse to breakpoint when I have inserted a 
breakpoint statement. I reckon the reason is because of a scope 
problem, since often stepping up to the place where a handler is 
called and then stepping into the handler causes it to respond to 
breakpoint from then on. The problem is that it is not always easy to 
do this, since some handlers are called directly by RunRev and then 
is no calling statement to step from.

>>2.  The documentaion is still poor.
>I disagree, but that is certainly a matter of judgment. I think the 
>docs are somewhere between quite adequate and excellent depending on 
>the topic. Spotty to be sure, but "poor"? I don't think so.

Maybe it is Spotty in content, but the format of it really sucks, 
IMO. I mean where in the docs that are supplied in the IDE does it 
tell you how setup and use the menu system under both mac and 
windows? There are lots of little clues dotted around all over the 
place, but nowhere does it tell you how to acheive this basic task. 
IMO, what is really needed in the equivilent of the "Inside 
Macinotsh: " books. Targeted at expert developers. The docs I have 
seen are aimed at someone writing a small light-weight application.

Not only that, there are gaping holes in the docs. For instance, how 
do I find out how to setup up a list of array's? Or if it's even 
possible? No mention anywhere of this that I can find.

This coupled with the fact that the IDE  (especially the docs window) 
is flakey makes it really hard to get going under Rev and still 
causes me to waste time after 2+ years of using it.

>>3.  It crashes or causes me to ForceQuit at 3 times a day on 
>>average when I am using it full time for development.
>Out of curiosity, are you using 2.6.1? On what platform? I have to 
>forced quit two or three times a week and about half the time I even 
>understand what I did to cause it. Three times a day on average 
>seems like a lot. But you may be doing far more sophisticated stuff 
>them I am.
>>4.  Windows in the IDE never open where you left them, especially 
>>when you have 2 monitors.
>Yeah, this one's a real PITA. I can't ell you how many times I've 
>had to use the message box to reposition windows that are on my 
>no-longer-connected external monitor.

You can't seem to get any information as to how many monitors are 
attached, or how big the Desktop is, this affects production software 
too. I was actually thinking of writing an external command to handle 
multiple monitors, the thing that has been putting me off is that I'd 
have to write it for Windows too, and I have no experience of 
programming at that level under Windows.


>>5.  The Script Editor does beswick at least 3 times a day, forcing 
>>me to restart RunRev.
>>
>"beswick"? Cool word but what does it mean? In any case, I use 
>Constellation now for script editing and haven't had a single 
>problem in weeks.

I guess the nearest American equivilent would be "postal"!!!!

But I still think RunRev is worth using, it's just it could be so 
much better. I've spent 5 months building a framework in RunRev that 
avoids a lot of the problems and makes it really fast to develop new 
objects and make them reusable. The learning curve I experienced 
needn't have been there if there were good documentation.

All the Best
Dave





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