On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 Troy Rollins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Not quite sure what you were expecting a response to. I saw the original message. I took it as commentary.
Troy,
While that may be surely true for a greater part of my post, further down you would have found questions and questionlike statements.
And I didn't have specific expectations as to a response.
There is such a broad community behind the "run" list with quite a lot of broad minds and also sometimes short tempers (a category I myself belong to now and then) and above all with widely diverging interests and different focus in their work. Therefore it is fully normal and acceptable that once in a while a post remains uncommented, because the topic may barely touch the present interests of others or is still out of view for lack of similar experiences.- I then just "re-posted" when some issues I had dealt with came up again on the list.
The Dreamcard player is big, but is oriented to allowing a single download for all purposes. "Custom" ones, output by a full Rev license would be smaller, but would not allow all DreamCard stacks to run, as they would be custom to an individual application - thus defeating the intention of a one-player-fits-all purpose. The concept with the player is obviously "once you have it, you don't need to get it again."
(snip)
In the meantime I had a look at the Dreamcard Players for Windows and MacOS and also at Dreamcard itself. Although a Metacard and Enterprise user I do this to find out whether a Dreamcard version would qualify - and be affordable - for inclusion into our classes and workshops for programming and multimedia development. Last year we had stopped using newer versions of Revolution when the "Free Edition" was no longer available. We still acquaint our students with the older versions and direct their attention to Revolution in general and to the trial versions.
I'll first address questions of the functionality of the Dreamcard Player(s) and then express some opinions about size and design of the Players.
A. Present Functionality
It seems that in the initial stage of development of the Dreamcard Player it is difficult to distinguish intended features from unintended functionality or bugs. The players work differently on both platforms and mostly not in accord with the Readme text:
> To use it, double click it, then either open the
> Dreamcard program you want to run using the Open button to the right of the
> address bar, or navigate to a program stored online by clicking on the User
> Spaces button."
The Dreamcard Player on MacOS X can be used in three different ways:
1. When the Dreamcard Player is launched by double-clicking on the Player icon, first the Revolution Online Viewer comes up. To access offline stacks you have to use the second control from the right on the Online View Viewer, which opens the file selection dialog.
The "Revolution" button at the right of the Online Viewer opens a Preference Dialog, which however cannot be set in a way to skip the Online Viewer next time the Player will be opened.
There is also nothing of this kind in the Revolution item of the Mac Menubar that would allow to switch off the "Online Viewer" preference.
2. The second way to use the Dreamcard Player is to drag stacks onto the "Revolution Player" icon. This leads to the simultaneous starting of the respective stack *and* the Online Viewer.
3. The third way to use the Dreamcard Player is to first rename the "Revolution Player" to "Revolution" and then again drag stacks onto this "Revolution" icon. This time, finally, only the used stack is opened - fortunately not accompanied by the Online Viewer.
Apart from the name, files "Revolution Player" and "Revolution" (as the engine) appear to be identical. Probably an internal check is carried out inside the engine what label is used for the file - in the same way as it is checking whether the label is "Revolution" or "Metacard" for use within the Metacard IDE.
On Windows (XP) the Dreamcard Player only behaves as described above as the third way for MacOS.
When you try to start the Dreamcard Player by double-clicking on Windows XP, nothing of what is described in the Readme happens, in fact nothing at all happens!
But you can drag stacks onto the "Revolution" icon of the Dreamcard Player, which then indeed then opens Rev and Metacard stacks like in #3 for MacOS, i.e without simultaneously opening the Revolution Online viewer. Unfortunately, however, no mouse cursors are visible inside the stack area of the opened stacks and you need to move the mouse "blindly".
B. Questions of Design
It seems to me to be annoying that when a user wants to open a specific stack and he can only do this via the Rev Online Viewer as in Mac example #1 (see above) or getting the Online Viewer in addition to the intended stack (Mac example #2).
It would be sufficient to have a file selection dialog that would of course provide the extra possibilty to open stacks online, but in such a case by simply opening a file "revonline.rev" before.-
You said (i.e. Troy) that "The Dreamcard player is big, but is oriented to allowing a single download for all purposes" and there you have indeed this "one-player-fits-all purpose" kind of application.
There is a German expression for such a type of things, namely the "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" - literally to be translated as 'the egg-laying wool-milk-sow' .
If you think such a wonderful all-purpose animal is the perfect design example for a player then you indeed need an application the size of 7.4 MB to open a stack of maybe only 20 KB, a situation of tremendous overkill.
On the extreme other side of a number of possible design solutions for a player could be a "minimal" player that only contains the engine and a small stack with only two buttons: One to open stacks, the other to save stacks (in case changes made by a user in a stack have to be saved). Given the new engine size of 1.7 MB such a player application would need no more than 1.8 MB.
The extra resources needed in a stack - that are contained in the IDE, but not in the engine - could be moved into the stack for use with the player (script libraries, database support, dialogs, icons etc.) before. In the Metacard IDE this is the purpose of the "Resource Mover", which is independent from the "Standalone Builder", in the Dreamcard version there is no equivalent for the "Standalone Application Settings" of the more expensive Revolution versions, but could be easily provided for Dreamcard, too, in a format similar to the Metacard "Resource Mover".
Of course a Dreamcard user could always move his special resources into his stacks "manually" but it is in most cases somewhat difficult to find where the needed scripts reside in the IDE and how they interact. Thus, given the complexity and often extreme interrelatedness of the Revolution IDE, it would be a better solution to offer a Dreamcard Resource Mover.
Among the different "philiosophies" of design for a player application of course intermediate solutions are possible as I have implemented them in my "MC-Player" for Revolution and Metacard stacks, with has a size of 2 MB and contains some basic resources like icons and dialogs.
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke <http://www.sanke.org>
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