I just downloaded it. I didn't have any problems downloading it, and it wasn't terribly slow either. I think my download speed averaged about 39k per second. It was the Mac version.
Now, once I downloaded it and played around with it, I'm both impressed and amused. He's obviously built this with RealBasic. And, as someone who used to struggle with the poor quality and bugginess of RealBasic, I have to hand it to him, he's achieved something nearly miraculous. Namely, he's almost managed to make a working HyperCard-like environment and he's done it in RealBasic. Did I mention that RealBasic is very buggy? (Okay, enough trashing on RB.) However, as impressed as I am with what he's managed to achieve, from the 15 minutes I spent playing with it, I'm amused that he was once attempting to charge money for it and I don't see how anyone could use it regularly for serious software development. For starters, the splash screen comes up and stays up on every launch until you click a button to dismiss it. Annoying. Before I launched Creator (that's the name of the HyperNext development environment, not to be confused with "Developer", which is the name of the HyperNext plugin creation tool). I attempted to double click on the HellowWorld.prj file in the included sample projects. TextMate opened up and displayed a garbled text interpretation of the project file. That might be my Mac's fault. I quit TextMate and then I right clicked on HelloWorld.prj and chose Open With Creator. Creator launched and I clicked the annoying button in the splash screen, but once the program loaded, HelloWorld.prj did not load. So, I went File, Open and opened the HelloWorld sample project. It's not much, just one card with two buttons on it. One of them opens a message box that says (you guessed it) "Hello World". The other button uses speech to say, "Hello World". I clicked on each button, clicked the edit script button in the properties window. All of the design windows disappear when you are in the code editor window. The code editor window seemed pretty straight forward. I didn't edit any code, I just clicked on each of the object/event pairs listed on the left and looked at the simple scripts in the edit window on the right. When you close the editor, the design evironment comes back. I then pressed "Run" in the "C Mode" window. This appeared to compile the project, suspend the development project and then run the compiled app. That's no biggie, except when I chose to quit, Creator just quit. It did not take me back to the development environment like I expected. Okay, so I opened up Creator again, and re-opened HelloWorld.prj. This time I clicked on "Preview" instead of "Run". And, the project ran as expected and I was able to switch back to "Design" using the "C Mode" window. I've now noticed that this window is present even when you choose "Run" and it can be used to switch from "Run" back to "Design". The next thing I did was compile HelloWorld for OS X. There are two OS X compile options in the "Go" menu, "Build Mac OS X PEF" and "Build Mac OS X MachO". Only the "Build Mac OS X PEF" option works, choosing the "Build Mac OS X MachO" option just presents a message box stating that this feature is not yet implemented. The app compiled. It built a 7.2MB Carbon application (when you right click on the compiled app, there is no "Show Package Contents" option). When I launched the compiled HelloWorld_X app, there was a default splash screen. There is no button on this splash screen for dismissal, but it sits on the screen until until you click in it. I think having a pre-made splash screen could be a nice feature. And, maybe there is an option somewhere in the project settings to determine whether or not to display the splash screen, or whether or not the user has to click on the splash screen to make it go away, but the default is awful. I can imagine many end users would be a bit stymied by the default splash screen of a compiled HyperNext project. A quick check of the Guide's entry on the Splash screen only tells how to customize the information within your project's splash screen, not how to disable it or have it automatically disappear after a pre-defined time. I then tried two other sample projects, the "Speak" sample project and the "MP3 Player" sample project. In the little bit of playing with HyperNext that I'd done up to now, something happened to Creator. When I switch from Design mode to Preview mode, events no longer seem to fire. I now have to either compile or switch to Run mode to have buttons respond and code execute. I've quit Creator and opened it several times and the problem remains. Even HelloWorld, which at first worked perfectly in Preview mode, will now only respond when in Run mode or by using the compiled app. And, now, every time I switch modes, my MacBook makes a strange click. Also, after I compiled the MP3 Player project and ran it, I tried dragging some MP3s into its window. They did get added to the list, but all of them showed a time of "0", so when I clicked "Play" the highlight would just move from track to track and there was no sound. One side note, it appears that the only style of button that you can have in your projects is the flat, square style that Revolution calls "Rectangle Button". I'm curious as to why that is, as it would prevent your apps (at least on the Mac) from ever having a standard, normal look and feel. Oh, one positive, is that because it inherits them from RealBasic, HyperNext's table fields look nicer than Revolution's. I don't know when Revolution will finally get around to providing us with decent table fields, but I'm getting tired of waiting for it. You even get nicer tables using AppleScript studio than you do with Revolution. Despite all of its problems, I couldn't help but think that HyperNext, with a little more time and attention might possibly morph into something useable. However, it's very possible that HyperNext's developer has attempted to achieve the impossible- he's attempting to build a development environment using the deeply flawed and extremely buggy RealBasic as his starting point. --- Jerry Daniels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bill, I couldn't even download the Mac version--even at the super > slow > download rate. > > On Jan 13, 2008, at 5:25 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: > > > Everytime I tried to download the WIndows version, I got a > > corrupted .zip > > file. (And anemic file transfer speed.) > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > use-revolution mailing list > > [email protected] > > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your > > subscription preferences: > > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution > > > > _______________________________________________ > use-revolution mailing list > [email protected] > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your > subscription preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
