on 20/6/05 3:42 pm, Jim Ault wrote : I have an idea for the coding contest, now and in the future. Note: currently I am starting two businesses and cannot participate, so this is a suggestion for others.
Dan Shafer made the statement in his keynote that one of the cool things about Hypercard was that it came with example stacks that let you see what it could do and look under the hood. If Rev is going to make real money and thrive, it has to appeal to customers outside the professional developers. With that in mind, could one of the 'contest' areas be making the original collection of stacks from Apple into Rev stacks that might include a section on 'how they did that'? Of course, beyond that, many of the powerful things you could do with Rev today. I would prefer that the Rev team work on fixing bugs than trying to come up with a set of demo stacks. Any interest? I think it would help promote our favorite development environment. Perhaps this could get a little section in theJournal each edition. Jim Ault Las Vegas *********************************** I very much agree, Jim. I listened to Dan's speech, and thought he was absolutely right. He's said it before, of course, and I blame myself for not taking him seriously enough. I have been thinking for a while about putting some real money into a prize contest for Rev developers of all levels of skill and experience. This looks like a very good focus. I should emphasise that this is quite separate from Bjornke's coding contest, which I think is a great idea - but directed at a different goal? Maybe there are political difficulties - what is RunRev's attitude to initiatives that, to be effective, would require their support but would not be under their control? I suspect they are pretty laid back about this, as use-revolution itself implies - a great way to get users to do the support work! But as Dan also said, a little more involvement from them would make a great difference (I note that Mark has been on-list several times lately, which is really good). Anything of the sort we are talking about would have to be part of the free download from RunRev, and to that extent "official". Is that a problem (a) for RunRev (b) for potential contributors? Sarah has also written about this recently. It's hard to recall now just how revolutionary (OK!) Hypercard felt back in '87. But my recollection was that you could suddenly do really neat things that looked way cool, using very simple tools and scripts (actually, I don't think we said "way cool" back then, but you know what I mean!). I'm not sure that is so easy today. Instead of crude B&W graphics we must nowadays incorporate (for example) those wonderful buttons that Chipp Walters is making at Altuit. There are just a whole lot more GUI features that must be covered (sliders, progressbars, colour icons, players...), and of course they all need to be genuinely x-platform (how many flavours of Unix do you need to test on?). Error-catching seems to me a much bigger deal than it was with Hypercard - and a demo stack just has to be bullet-proof. Unfortunately (I gather from real developers) this is where a major part of the hard work of development goes - the parts that are not fun or glamorous... Would people be interested in doing such work? Would new users get enough out of the results? Do you remember Bill Atkinson's original Rolodex address book? Each card had the little holes at the bottom for the metal thingummies to go through... What would a 2005 version look like? My first thought is that if it doesn't look grreat on WinXP then forget it. I'm impressed by "Scripters Scrapbook" - in 1988 I wrote, and still use, a similar gadget - but my GUI is just pathetic in comparison. How much effort is that worth, in this context? For me this is a real dilemma. I would love to commission or sponsor some beautiful software - I mean literally beautiful, as in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, whatever the 2005 equivalent is - but I'm also concerned that Revolution out of the box is not, as Dan put it, "seductive". Maybe these goals are not compatible? Apologies for going on at such length. I'm thinking aloud, which is usually not a good idea when people are listening! Perhaps off-list feedback is preferable... _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
