ERC Journal Day 3:
Malte continued yesterday's overview of Rev basis, wrapping it up with a demo of using the Application Builder. He covered it well, including the capability Monte added to do instant builds from saved settings. But even better was when he jumped back into multimedia library and other tools and demos he included on the CD he prepared for us attendees. His MM lib is very handy, with the ability to move objects along ellipses as well as circles, and it also covers some path-based options that go beyond the "move" command.
He also showed a new game he's been developing, which is not only graphically attractive but has some damn clever code. He needed animated loops with richer colors than GIFs provide, so he wrote some handlers to create looped PNGs with timers. Coupled with his path animation libs, the game makes extensive use of timers in a smoother way than I would have thought possible.
Malte then showed an earlier game he'd made, rather like Tetris in which objects falls from the sky and you use the arrow keys to guide two children holding a box to catch them. He uses timers for nearly everything there, and has enough clock cycles left over to do hit-testing on all of the falling objects to see if they're in the box. He does the hit-testing with the intersect function, walking through the objects with "repeat with i = 1 to 6". He reminded us how slow the "repeat with" construct is, and says that he has another game he'll post in which he replaced that with "repeat for each" with an order of magnitude better performance: he says the new game does hit-testing on 550 objects with no performance degradation. Astounding.
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Fr�d�ric Rinaldi covered a wide range of valuable tips during his talk, including useful plugins and tools, the power of the filter and match commands, and an overview of the challenges and solutions he encountered in making his new product, FastMailBase.
His TabRuler plugin is way cool. One of the nice things about a seminar like this is getting a fresh perspective on stuff you already have on your hard drive. Rinaldi's TabRuler is pre-installed with Rev, and since I spend most of my time in MetaCard I hadn't spent much time with Rev plugins. No more -- TabRuler is way cool, as is Rinaldi's PrefsBuilder, which makes short work of setting up a Prefs dialog.
Rinaldi then showed is stack that demo's the power of the filter command. I'd talked with him briefly about this last night, and have a fresh appreciation for the powerful combination of using regex with filter. His Filter Demo stack is an even niftier variant of his RegEx builder (also bundled with Rev), and like its predecessor is quite useful.
Rinaldi's FastMailBase looks like a great product. It addresses a problem we all face: managing large volumes of email. If you get a lot of emails every day, leaving them in your mail client will bog your system down. But how to archive? None of the major email packages have a decent means of archiving, but thankfully Rinaldi is an inventive soul: FastMailBase can archive mail from most major email clients, including Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla, and many others. He provides extensive options for specifying criteria for exporting to the archive, and he uses the Valentina database engine for efficient storage with rapid access. Once in FastMailBase, your day-to-day email is lighter and faster, and Rinaldi provide a very complete set of search tools to dig through your archives as needed, including the ability to reply to a message directly from within the program.
Fr�d�ric also showed is the custom standalone building tool he uses. He poked around in Rev's App Builder to find the hooks he needed, and was able to construct from that a very quick app builder that does everything he needs to do for making a perfect standalone every time - in just one click.
He also reviewed some tips for multi-platform work, including using special characters in scripts, AppleScript/Shell/Registry/VBScript calls, separation lines in option controls, menubar behavior, window name conventions that differ between platforms, and closing windows vs. quitting on Windows.
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After a leisurely lunch, Jan Schenkel began his session on building enterprise apps in Rev with an overview of database options, looking beyond the tech aspects alone to consider licensing and other considerations. His personal favorite for many projects is RevDB, and he gave a demo on setting it up and using it.
Jan then showed us a demo of Quartam Reports, his very powerful tool for generating database reports. It's very close to release, and very polished. Every aspect of it, from the layout tools to the Print Preview stack, all have a very polished, professional look. Amazingly it provides query support for nearly any data source you'd want to use in a Rev-based app, from MySQL to a stack of cards.
QR is cool. Very cool. Certainly worth the wait. The Layout Builder is gorgeous, and the query broker goes far beyond the old Nine to Five Reports externals for HyperCard. All together QR looks like a great value, with business model that should be attractive for both beginners needing a solution for their own printing to pro app developers who need comprehensive printing for their commercial products. Can't wait for the public beta -- next week?
Jan also explored other parts of serving the enterprise, including Internet services like SOAP, XML-RPC, and more, and showed an example app that demonstrates many common business functions, including database access, sending mail, a nifty use of the merge function for formatted preview -- and all in a UI that translates itself between three different languages.
It occurs to me in reviewing these posts that there's so much that words simply can't capture here, about the million small ways face-to-face get togethers do something that the list simply can't do. Hopefully Andre will be able to employ his wit to capture some of that, as he's volunteered to take over as blogger-on-the-road for the post-conference tour to Gozo.
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