Jon wrote:
I'm curious. How many of you use Rev to make a living, and how many of you just play with it.

I've been making a living with xTalks for 11 years as of 4/4, and almost exclusively with the Rev engine (going back to when it was called "MetaCard") since '98.

I'm at the point where I can't believe anyone could use it to do serious development. It is just too buggy, syntax idiosyncrasies and sloth aside.

I haven't yet seen the development tool with no bugs, and fortunately with Rev nearly all can be worked around; there are few true show-stoppers, unlike bad headers that have shipped with CodeWarrior, and other things you'll find in reading the dev lists for other products.

But unlike those other products, Rev is among the very few IDEs that truly eats its own dogfood: it's written in Transcript, which means it's fully modifiable, extensible, and even replaceable.

For example, while I make my living with the engine I rarely use the Rev IDE at all, being one of the ol' timers who still use the MetaCard IDE. Other IDEs are possible, a couple in the works, and there are dozens of tools available as plugins that work in any of these IDEs.

So if you find RunRev troublesome but are interested in Transcript, with a few minutes online you can assemble a toolkit to fit your personal preferences.


And how many of you successfully deploy cross-platform applications?

I ship an average of at least one commercial cross-platform application every month for the last several years.

That is my holy grail, but I'm so far away from that I can't even imagine it.

Imagining it's the easy part. Making it's not much harder. The tough part is testing it throughly. :)

What issues have you encountered shipping yours? As with learning any new tool, you'll find this discussion list community to be your most valuable resource. Feel free to take advantage of us. :)

Finally, are there any cross-platform dos and don'ts?

There are, and Ken, Jacque, and I will be doing a panel called "Cross-Platform Gotchas" at RevCon West in two weeks:
<http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit/RevConWest/>

We'll post our notes somewhere on the web so those who couldn't make it can get at least an overview of what's covered.


I read that the Ask Files dialog is system-dependent at the Filters level. I understand why this might be necessary, but it sure shoots a hole in simple cross-platform applications.
:)

Mac OS, OS X, and Windows each uses a different means of identifying file types.

It's not possible for RunRev to know all the file possible combinations of file types you might want to filter, but fortunately it's not too hard to write a function to handle any specific type of file you need for both platforms.

I'll cover this in-depth at an upcoming article for revJournal.com soon, but here's a quick example to get you started:

function MyGetFile
 put "Select a document:" into tPrompt
 if the platform is "MacOS" then
  answer file tPrompt of type "MFIL" --< your file type
 else
  answer file tPrompt with filter "*.mfl" --< your file extension
 end if
 if it is empty then exit to top
 return it
end MyGetFile


--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 __________________________________________________
 Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev
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