Richard Gaskin wrote: > Taking a brief look at the iShell IDE, I'm sure I'm missing something: What > part of iShell could one not build in Rev? > > If the new owners of iShell ever take a dive, I wonder if it would be worth > building an iShell-like alternative UI for Rev....
You are probably right, Richard. There may be nothing about it that is not doable in Rev. The same could probably be said for many development platforms out there. Rev is very powerful and flexible. I imagine that one could recreate many different UI styles within it. What I'm not sure about is the question of whether it's only a "skin deep" issue. The difference I see currently is more in the field of "product category". I believe it was Geoff who pointed out some development categories - putting Rev more in the vein of RealBasic - as an app development tool, and iShell more in the vein of Director, as a multimedia development tool. I would agree with this. Ishell's handling of media elements is quite good. Very likely the best there is. Programming of media events is fast, powerful, and has an ease of logic development that defies competition. It has proven to be stable, reliable and more flexible than I would have imagined. When used in its area of specialization, I have not seen anything that equals it for speed of development, and reusable code structures. It is perhaps the fastest platform to be able to open "old" code, and understand what is going on, and be able to edit it, as one is not chasing code "all over the place". Yes, I realize that final part is really a UI issue. I am more a developer than programmer. I LIKE things graphical. Ishell allows even the code to be graphical and attractive - and fun. But, I think it may go deeper - into the underlying document structure. Its implementation of object oriented code is the first and only one that has ever made sense to me. Made sense in that it is actually more elegant to USE OOP than not - in most other tools, I personally don't believe this is the case. The logic behind the way iShell works is different than Rev. None of this takes away from Rev in any way. In my company, they both have their place, and we are starting to see where the dividing line is. Currently, one of those lines is this - if it wants to look like an application - Rev. If it wants to look like multimedia - iShell. There are others. I guess all I'm really getting at is that a recreation of iShell would be a lot more than UI. Rev may indeed be suited to that task, but it would be no small project. Now - if iShell (Tribeworks) DOES take a dive - I for one would welcome such a development. The all-purpose power of Rev, and the elegance and media handling of iShell. THAT would be cool. Cheers. -- Troy RPSystems www.rpsystems.net
