Interesting discussion on iPad content

[Rodney Somerstein]

Heather Nagey wrote:

>Thought you folks might appreciate:
>
>http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/the-ipad-needs-its-hypercard.html
>

That is somewhat interesting and I noticed that several Runrev fans 
have started putting comments there. (Too much of that and people 
will start thinking it is a concerted advertising campaign or 
somesuch.)

However, the article seems to be a call for an affordable equivalent 
to Hypercard for the iPad. That is, something that would let the 
"amateurs and professionals", as the article says, have a really good 
tool for creating content. RunRev has this for the Mac and PC, 
especially with RevMedia. Unfortunately, no such equivalent is 
available for the iPad.

The iPad is such a perfect platform for that kind of tool. 
Unfortunately, the tools seem to be targeted at serious developers - 
expensive, annual fees, etc. - not the person who wants to 
experiment. (I'm not just talking about RunRev here) Apple is also 
doing their part to keep the average person out by forcing most 
people to learn Objective-C to develop for the iPad and not allowing 
executable code to be run on the iPad.

Right now, it seems like the best bet for the average person is 
developing a web-based application if they want to target the 
iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch market. Not so satisfying since that option 
requires an Internet connection and doesn't really allow data to be 
stored on the iPad.

I understand the reasoning behind the Rev-mobile pricing. But trying 
to convince anyone that Rev-mobile is for the amateurs with the 
current pricing model is pretty much a nonstarter, I suspect. 
Hopefully, after the development phase is done, something along the 
lines of RevMedia (or even a reasonable target like RevStudio) will 
be possible to produce to target that audience as well. Maybe there 
can be a split for that market with similar restrictions to RevMobile 
as in the RevStudio & RevEnterprise products.

The trick would probably be to figure out what can be left out of a 
RevMobile-lite - you wouldn't be running full databases, etc. on 
there. It could certainly be restricted to running on one platform 
per license, such as iPad only, iPhone/iPod Touch only, etc. (If it 
is even possible to internally set a flag to do that or at least 
automatically generate an error when someone tries to run it on the 
wrong kind of hardware.) There could be a slight upgrade fee to 
produce universal i-apps that can run on both. Maybe there are other 
and/or additional restrictions that would let such a thing make sense?

-Rodney