Maybe I'm a bit stupid - but this seems rather redundant; unless one is building a sort of TaskBar with RR.
What is much more interesting, to my mind, is the ability of RR stacks to import data from documents/files generated by other applications (cf RR's database capabilities), process it, and, if necessary, export the processed data in a form that the parent program of the originating document/file can read. This is a way that the "small man" can access data in files generated by hugely expensive proprietary applications for the price of, for example, DreamCard. Now, far be it for me to 'rubbish' Microsoft products (cough, cough), but it is a well-known fact that Microsoft and its software products dominate the computer world - with the extremely undesirable result that a very large part of the world depends on pirate software to get its business done. As a person who is not over-enamoured of either Microsoft products or pirate software, and understands that full-blown Open-Source equivalents (cf. Open Office) take years of effort, it seems to me that there might be quite a niche for RR-developed programs to access (um; MS Access is one of the cases in point) proprietary formats quickly and inexpensively. During my Masters degree course at the University of Abertay (breath in a moment here) the programming instructor taught us extremely simple stuff with Visual Basic (why Abertay claimed that those who finished the MSc in Computers and IT would be at an equivalent level to those who had completed a 4-year undergraduate course I will never know) - one of the programming exercises was to build a front-end to retrieve information from a MS Access file. The main thing I learnt during that course was that Visual Basic was incredibly clunky compared with RR - and that almost everything that VB could do, RR could do at least as well if not slighty better. It was never explained to us how learning to write a program that displayed seven varieties of cars in a showroom would equip us for the real world of computer programming (especially as I remember doing real number-crunching stuff with Fortran in 1976 at a school); in fact nothing was either justified or rationalised - so I drew my own conclusion, which was that the underpinnings of MS Office and so on being VB (or VBA) should mean that it would be relatively easy to write RR equivalents of all those VB exercises that opened Excel docs, etc without all the rather odd, old-fashioned legacy stuff that seemed to be built into VB + (of course) the platform dependency which MetaCard managed to get beyond when it took on the Hypercard platform dependency problem. Having written this I will now try to find a spot of time to run up a sweet little number to extract data from an Excel file - and, as usual, I expect I'm a bit late in the race and some fiendishly clever RR/MC maven has managed this already! sincerely, Richmond Mathewson PS. Just poked my nose into a Microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan06/01-10Macworld2006PR.mspx where I read something about Open XML - obviously nobody is going to have to work too hard if data is really stored in open XML (rather than xml + some funny encryption). __________________________________________________ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html _______________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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
