I happen to really like RunRev. But I'm only using it because I know Dan Shafer, and in the process of emailing him about another project mentioned that I was going to use RealBasic for my photo album project, and he, in quite large capitals, SUGGESTED I USE RR INSTEAD.
Before Dan convinced me otherwise, I had looked at the two web sites (RR vs RB), the two IDEs, the plug-ins available, and the two user communities, and had come up with this list of why I thought RealBasic was a better choice:
1) the RB user group is much more active, and there are tons more plugins written for it.
2) you can override a lot more things in RB -- e.g. you can override the draw method of a list box and get an alternating blue and white background.
3) RB has a pretty good table box, which RunRev doesn't have (you can fake it, but who wants to have to fake it all the time).
4) The RB app builder is slicker, and seemed to have better placement and movement options.
5) The RB geometry engine is much easier to use and understand, and it seemed to work better too.
So, all in all it looked like RB was a better choice.
Now back to your comment about the RR apps at http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/chooserevolution/index.shtml. I hope you don't mind me being blunt, but that page is quite poorly laid out (as, I'm sorry to say, is the rest of the RR web site). I don't know why there are two levels on that page because there really aren't enough programs under each of the categories to make it worth having the second level page. And, in looking at the programs listed I'd have to agree with Andy that there aren't any that I would call particularly "ambitious" either.
But enough of the complaints. Here are a couple of suggestions for how the RR site could be made better:
1. Needs a basic overhaul -- layout, wording, all pages linked in somewhere, etc. And the online purchase process needs some help too.
2. Thd docs should be online, and should be comment-able by users. Take a look at the PHP (http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php -- look at all the comments at the bottom of the page) and MySql (http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/index.html -- same for comments at bottom of the page) online docs -- both are searchable, and comment-able.
3. Lots of lightweight examples are needed. RR can do a bunch of stuff easier than RB, and there needs to be a couple of dozen examples showing how cool some of these features are: images, QT, audio, video, file manipulation, database, etc. These should all be downloadable as standalone mini-apps that run on every platform available.
4. Pricing. If they're going to compete with RB (but maybe they're not?), RR should rethink pricing a bit. $299 minimum for a single machine against a $99 minimum for RB was a tough nut to swallow (for $199 you can buy both Mac and Windows IDEs for RB). After Dan's email I spent a month building the program, but I wouldn't have ever started just by looking at the $299.
5. Target platforms. A long time ago (1994) I wrote a web server plugin that worked on Mac WebStar web server, Windows IIS web server, as well as Apache and Netscape servers that ran on Solaris, BSD, Linux, FreeBSD and SGI. I was convinced that supporting all those platforms was going to give me a big boost against my competitors. But all it did was take my eye off the ball, and with all those platforms to compile and test for I didn't have enough cycles left to add new features, which put me behind my competitors in terms of things that MOST OF MY CUSTOMERS cared about.
So, RR might consider dropping support for some or all of the UNIX/Linux variants if they're finding that supporting all these platforms is causing problems getting the next version for their primary platforms (Mac and Windows) out the door. Only they know how many people care about UNIX/Linux, but I'll bet it's a fraction of the Mac/Windows market, and if it is, it might be time to let it go for a release of two and see what happens.
Hope this helps.
-- Frank
On Wednesday, February 4, 2004, at 04:04 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Subject: Re: Rev Review To: How to use Revolution <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
David Vaughan wrote:
Rev 2.1 has now been reviewed in Australian MacWorld (Feb p68)
Andy Ihnatko's review is generally positive in a post-Hypercard way although I personally disagree with his closing comment: "Just don't imagine that you'll be able to build the ambitious programs you can turn out in RealBasic and Xcode".
I think Andy's never been to:
<http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/chooserevolution/index.shtml>
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation
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