Ken Norris wrote: >> You are thinking too Mac-centric. No other platform moves its About menu >> around like the Mac. Everywhere else, the About is under the Help menu. >> It is a convenience that Revolution transparently handles the various >> positions of the Macintosh About menu for you, since the position is >> different even between OS 9 and OS X. By placing the About item under >> the Help menu, your stack will display properly on any OS and you won't >> ever have to think about it. > ---------- > It's just that there is nothing in the docs to tell us this is what happens, > so I wasn't expecting it. There's probably other stuff like that, too. I'm > looking for that list.
I remember how hard it was for me to learn SuperCard when I came from a background in HyperCard, and years later how hard Ken, Christopher Watson, and myself worked to deliver one of the most comprehensive sets of docs for an authoring tool ever at the time, only to find how hard it was even after we delivered them for folks to readily find everything they needed. With complex systems like authoring tools, experience is the best teacher. Since I came into Rev from MetaCard years before, I'm less familiar with Rev's docs, but generally find them far better than MC's, and roughly on par with SuperCard's (there's a great many more tokens to document in Rev, so the Rev docs have generally more stuff overall). Knowing Jeanne's thoroughness (it was, after all, her HyperCard book that we used as the inspiration for form and breadth when we rewote SuperCard's docs), I took a look in the docs to see what I could find on this subject. Here's what I did: 1. In Rev's menu bar, I chose Help->Revolution Documentation 2. In the list on the front card of that stack, I chose "Menus", which brings up a list of topics on the right. In that list, assuming I had no experience with Rev, I simply chose the first item, "About...menus and the menu bar", thinking it might provide a good overview from which I could explore other details as needed. 3. In that section is a subsection titled "Menu Bars on Mac OS and OS X Systems", which describes the behavior in question, with more detail and more concisely than even the discussion here on this list. Ken and I once had the pleasure of working under the same manager, a man of impecible character and unusual insight. I found myself frustrated with learning Gain Momentum, since it was not only a larger and more complex xTalk than I'd known before (20 volumes of manuals stacked three feet high), but it also required me to learn Unix at the same time. It was a lot to bite off at once, and after coming from years of solid SuperCard mastery I was frustrated with finding myself nearly completely ignorant, starting at the very bottom of the learning curve all over again. I took my concerns to my manager, and here's what he told me: If you plant a seed today and pour ten thousand gallons of water on it, you still won't have a tree tommorrow. Some things simply take time and patience, and learning is definitely more of a process than an event. This is especially difficult when coming from another tool, and compounded when that tool rests in the relative comfort of a single operating system: For years you've grown into a comfortable mastery of the tool, and over time the "learning muscle" in some respects atrophies. Observing myself with both learning new tools and with physical therapy after a hiking accident last year, I know how hard it is to reverse atrophy. But as my physical therapist reminded me, "movement begets movement": every small effort made in a direction of growth has a compounded effect over time. Initially there are few measurable results, and such work begins as an act of faith and will. But over time, with the encouragement of others who've crossed that mountain before you, you have to trust that it's achievable. And after a while your results will provide all the encouragement you'll need, and may even serve to inspire others as they begin the same path. So please be patient with yourself, and try to be patient with the docs. They're not perfect, but frankly they are among the most comprehensive you'll find, even when compared to the big publishers like Adobe and Macromedia. In nearly evry case, I'll stake my reputation on the assertion that the topic is covered in Jeanne's docs. And for those few cases where a topic is not in a clear place or even more rare, not covered at all, a brief note to her will see it corrected as soon as possible, and a note to this list will put you on the right track immediately. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
