Having read the latest Mathewson v. Kane mini-rant, I thought it was
about time somebody long-in-the-tooth, white-haired and Gandalf-like
synthesised a few things. As a persistent, silent reader for many
years on this list, I assume I can be allowed one message of
(positively) negative comment before I am banned or threatened with
legal action!
Going back to all the HyperCard nostalgia, as I remember it, HC was
intended to become another 'atom' of QuickTime to supply the
interactive multi-platform programming element - but Apple were weak
at the time and somebody powerful and threatening from outside killed
that great development idea off. So we developers all reluctantly had
to abandon HC, fork out big money and migrate to Director/Flash/etc.
to make our software multi-platform, get it onto the web and into the
global market. Instead of an 'Open Source'-like, killer-platform that
would have been QTHC, we ended up with all the present HC-->Rev
clones, practically divorced from the main multi-platform UI of the
web browser, and with QT as an under-developed dying duck, losing out
to Real and MS. They all remain as small or shrinking applications
with an ambiguous identity in a now much wider web-based (soon to be
mobile-based) world.
Rev tries hard to be a commercial company with a proprietary app, but
it still suffers from the same ill-defined usage identity that HC
did. It has unfortunately alienated many of the 'academic' users who
made HC what it was, 'Open Source' in all but name, believing that
these 'freeby people' were the cause of its demise (even if people s
had by then been forced to start paying a fair amount for it!!) while
the truth is that HC failed because Apple were unable to make it
multiplatform and web-embeddable.
Rev continues to contemplate its own navel with all its talk of
'pros' on this list, while consistently looking down its nose at the
so-called hobbyist, newby or daft-headed academic (consider this:
would that 'million dollar app' have been made if it were not through
the cooperation of an academic with a bright idea and a brilliant Rev
programmer??). The list is mainly filled with posts from self-styled
'experts' who are actual investors in the company and make their
living from its success or failure and therefore are biassed by
definition. Their comments prove nothing to me and merely try to
overshadow others with their barrage of positive messages.
Having been in at the beginning of the hypertext 'revolution' (almost
2 decades ago, before CDs and the web even existed) and already
building multimedia educational apps in HC and ToolBook, I have ever
since been waiting for the multi-platform successor to bring me back
to the user-friendly, universal app we all ('pro' or 'hobbyist')
deserve. But I am still waiting for Rev to prove itself as a stable
and reliable vehicle for delivering software in a global market - I
stopped updating a year ago and certainly won't be continually
updating every year until it does exactly what Richmond Mathewson
says and sorts out a stable, 'virtually' bug-free version. But, as
Scott Kane says, if things continue as they are I expect global
events and other orgs will have overtaken Rev by then ...
Wake up Rev management/programming team! Open up to a cooperative,
community-based strategy which welcomes criticism and innovation and
is openly friendly to its user base - evolve, mature and learn to be
flame proof! Allow people to produce Rev advice sites and repository
sites or to form non-commercial user groups, instead of saying "No,
we'll set this up, since we know what we are doing and can do it
better", and then effectively strangle these initiatives by always
failing to come up with the goods because you obviously don't have
the resources. Control-freakery will merely leave you as a small
struggling company in a small commercial backwater, instead of being
the globally recognised and commercially successful HC/MC successor
you ought to be by now.
I suggest non-flame-resistant 'experts' and others who may feel
aggrieved at what I have said should contemplate the positive message
intended in this comment, before blinkeredly concentrating on their
own personal ego defences - now and again we all have to suffer some
unintended unfair criticism to see the error of our ways, and I am
quite willing to be the first to accept that what I have said here
may contain some ...
End of one-off, non-continuing comment!
Mike
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