RevMobile first impressions?

Sarah Reichelt sarah.reichelt at gmail.com
Thu Mar 4 17:38:17 EST 2010


2010/3/5 François Chaplais <francois.chaplais at mines-paristech.fr>:
> I received by mail the availability on the pre alpha revmobile release. I still have a week to use a coupon that entitles me 5 years for the price of one (reason is I have done the same for studio). Still, this is 700€, which is a lot considering I probably will never make any money of it.
>
> So, has someone jumped in the wagon and can share his/her impressions?
>
> This would be very appreciated.
>
> I went though the buying process and cancelled at the last moment when I saw the price...
>
> On the other hand, I love the idea of programming for the iPhone/iPad.

Just started it up and tested my first stack, so these are really very
superficial first impressions. I don't see any problem telling you
about since there is already so much detail on the runrev site - I
just can't give you my downloaded copy or login details.

You install a plugin to Rev. Open your stack file and tell the plugin
to use this stack. You can give it various other parameters like a
bundle name, icon etc, as well as setting it up with a profile for
distribution (although I don't know if this bit works yet). Then just
click the "Start" button on the plugin and the iPhone simulator pops
up and your stack is running.

I just dragged some basic interface elements in to see how they looked.
First impression - the display is very like MetaCard used to be: grey
& blocky. However RunRev has said that the native iPhone look will be
coming later, so that isn't something to worry about.
It feels very fast - certainly faster to get started in the iPhone
Simulator than my XCode projects, and then the response feels snappy.
The basic interface elements just work: clicking in an unlocked field
pops up the keyboard, clicking away makes it disappear. Radio buttons,
check boxes, sliders all work.
Dialogs: answer works fine and produces a native alert box, ask does nothing.
You cannot test on the iPad simulator yet.

I'm really excited about this. Now a single language and IDE allows us
to deliver on the desktop, web, server and mobile. It's going to be
fantastic.

Should you spend the money? That's a tricky one. I spent a
considerable time last year learning XCode so I could program on the
iPhone, and I believe that anyone who can program in Rev can learn to
program in XCode - it all just takes longer. While XCode itself is
free, you will need to buy books and invest a lot of time learning.
And you do need an iPhone developer license to get any apps on to an
iPhone. So it comes down to the value of your time and whether you
think you can get the return on investment.

I will be exploring revMobile further during the day, and if people
are interested, I am happy to post my more detailed impressions later.

Cheers,
Sarah



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