Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Andre Garzia]

Richard,

Great post! It appears Rev universe is about to bloom with new editor
options... Just from the top of my head, the editors/IDEs I've seen done in
the last few years

* Devolution/4W Editor
* Galaxy/Constellation/GLX2
* MC IDE
* tRev
* Concept Editor
* Aesu
* Scott Rossi über-pretty tools

And I am sure there are more which I don't even know.

I foresee interesting times ahead...

:D
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Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Mark Talluto]

Looking forward to seeing this Richard!


Best regards,

Mark Talluto
http://www.canelasoftware.com



On Jul 26, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> And for Rev users that's a bigger deal than it is for MC users, because among 
> Rev's complexities are a good many differences it introduces between 
> development and runtime (where are libraries stored and can you control all 
> of them?).  Know the engine, trust the engine, use the engine.

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Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Jerry Daniels]

Great post, Richard!

Best,

Jerry Daniels

Join the Rodeo discussion:
http://rodeoapps.com/discuss-among-yourselves-0

On Jul 26, 2010, at 10:11 AM, Richard Gaskin  wrote:

> Richmond wrote:
> 
>> On 07/26/2010 02:25 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> then mine,
>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Richard Gaskin
>> 
>> Boy, I must have been asleep; do tell as would love to try it.
> 
> Your quote was trimmed a bit too short to determine what you were referring 
> to, so I had to go back to the original message and search for "then mine," 
> to find this:
> 
>In Rev, any IDE is merely a collection of stacks that runs
>on top of the engine.   The first IDE for this engine was
>MetaCard, then FreeGUI, then Rev, then mine, then Jerry's,
>and there may be others.  All just stacks - you can write
>your own too if you're so inclined; it can be kinda fun.
> 
> What follows is a bit of a rant on complexity, which the reader is encouraged 
> to ignore if they have anything better to do (I try to keep my off-topic 
> comments here to a minimum, and save 'em up for one long post ):
> 
> 
> When I first started working with MetaCard in '97, I did what I tend to do 
> with any new xTalk I pick up:  I made tools for it.
> 
> I had started Fourth World on 4/4/94 publishing tools for SuperCard, and did 
> rather well with SC for many years, sorta the Heizer of the SC world (and for 
> Heizer too; we had a page in their catalog).  But when SC didn't make it to 
> Windows during the same period Apple posted two years of annual losses, my 
> clients were scrambling for a cross-platform solution.  As much as I liked 
> Toolbook, maintaining two code bases in SC and TB wasn't going to be 
> cost-effective, so we started migrating work to MC.
> 
> Making tools for MC was almost a necessity, spartan as that IDE was. These 
> tools kept growing, and by the time Rev was born in 2000 I was already 
> spending relatively little time with MC's UI, using mostly my own stuff 
> within its framework.
> 
> The first commercial add-on for Rev was devolution, a packaging of some of 
> those tools, released long before Rev even had RevSelect.  More of a 
> collection of utilities than a complete IDE, it was a starting point which 
> has been in continual development ever since.  The publicly-available version 
> is quite old; between the need to rethink the updater and being busy with an 
> abundance of interesting client work, the public version has fallen quite 
> behind the current tool set.
> 
> Today devolution includes a much broader range of stuff, from a 
> Macromedia-inspired inspector to a standalone builder, and its MetaCard-bound 
> history is nearly completely severed.  Once the last dependencies on MC have 
> been purged from its framework, I'll use the new RIP Updater tool I've been 
> working on to release it; extra bonus points that the RIP Updater will work 
> with all RIP-savvy tools (for more on RIP see the Rev Interoperability 
> Project at ).
> 
> When devo2 is released it'll speak for itself, so there's no need to spend 
> much time on it here.  Some may like it, some won't, and that's okay.  I made 
> it for me and my clients, and will be sharing it as-is in case others find it 
> useful.
> 
> I will however indulge in describing one small part of devo2:  the debugger, 
> which I'm working on now with some help from Ken Ray.
> 
> 
> At the heart of devolution is my xTalk mantra:
> 
>Know the engine.
>Trust the engine.
>Use the engine.
> 
> We all use any variety of scripted tools on top of the engine, but the engine 
> itself is the one thing we all use, and the only part of the Rev experience 
> our customers use.   So the engine is unusually well tested, having been 
> through more gauntlets than any IDE can be.  It's the engine that binds this 
> community, the well from which we all drink.
> 
> The engine employs a certain logic to how it deals with things, and I believe 
> it benefits a toolmaker to understand that logic and use with-the-grain 
> solutions whenever possible.
> 
> For example, stacks appear in windows and have a "style" property to govern 
> the window's mode.  So if you're making plugins you could just use that 
> property, and the engine can take care of rendering the window as palette, 
> modeless, or whatever you've set its style to.
> 
> The Rev IDE, however, added a custom property to mirror this natural 
> behavior, the cRevLoadInfo["mode"] property.  I can't claim to understand why 
> this was used instead of the built-in property already available, but as you 
> poke around in Rev you'll find other similar things in which the IDE adds 
> additional layers on top of things the engine already does quite well.
> 
> Debugging in Rev takes a similar tack.
> 
> Historically, most Rev scripting environments use the same window for both 
> editing and debugging, but the two are very different tasks.
> 
> Writing scripts and traci

Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:


On 07/26/2010 02:25 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:



 then mine,




--
 Richard Gaskin


Boy, I must have been asleep; do tell as would love to try it.


Your quote was trimmed a bit too short to determine what you were 
referring to, so I had to go back to the original message and search for 
"then mine," to find this:


In Rev, any IDE is merely a collection of stacks that runs
on top of the engine.   The first IDE for this engine was
MetaCard, then FreeGUI, then Rev, then mine, then Jerry's,
and there may be others.  All just stacks - you can write
your own too if you're so inclined; it can be kinda fun.

What follows is a bit of a rant on complexity, which the reader is 
encouraged to ignore if they have anything better to do (I try to keep 
my off-topic comments here to a minimum, and save 'em up for one long 
post ):



When I first started working with MetaCard in '97, I did what I tend to 
do with any new xTalk I pick up:  I made tools for it.


I had started Fourth World on 4/4/94 publishing tools for SuperCard, and 
did rather well with SC for many years, sorta the Heizer of the SC world 
(and for Heizer too; we had a page in their catalog).  But when SC 
didn't make it to Windows during the same period Apple posted two years 
of annual losses, my clients were scrambling for a cross-platform 
solution.  As much as I liked Toolbook, maintaining two code bases in SC 
and TB wasn't going to be cost-effective, so we started migrating work 
to MC.


Making tools for MC was almost a necessity, spartan as that IDE was. 
These tools kept growing, and by the time Rev was born in 2000 I was 
already spending relatively little time with MC's UI, using mostly my 
own stuff within its framework.


The first commercial add-on for Rev was devolution, a packaging of some 
of those tools, released long before Rev even had RevSelect.  More of a 
collection of utilities than a complete IDE, it was a starting point 
which has been in continual development ever since.  The 
publicly-available version is quite old; between the need to rethink the 
updater and being busy with an abundance of interesting client work, the 
public version has fallen quite behind the current tool set.


Today devolution includes a much broader range of stuff, from a 
Macromedia-inspired inspector to a standalone builder, and its 
MetaCard-bound history is nearly completely severed.  Once the last 
dependencies on MC have been purged from its framework, I'll use the new 
RIP Updater tool I've been working on to release it; extra bonus points 
that the RIP Updater will work with all RIP-savvy tools (for more on RIP 
see the Rev Interoperability Project at 
).


When devo2 is released it'll speak for itself, so there's no need to 
spend much time on it here.  Some may like it, some won't, and that's 
okay.  I made it for me and my clients, and will be sharing it as-is in 
case others find it useful.


I will however indulge in describing one small part of devo2:  the 
debugger, which I'm working on now with some help from Ken Ray.



At the heart of devolution is my xTalk mantra:

Know the engine.
Trust the engine.
Use the engine.

We all use any variety of scripted tools on top of the engine, but the 
engine itself is the one thing we all use, and the only part of the Rev 
experience our customers use.   So the engine is unusually well tested, 
having been through more gauntlets than any IDE can be.  It's the engine 
that binds this community, the well from which we all drink.


The engine employs a certain logic to how it deals with things, and I 
believe it benefits a toolmaker to understand that logic and use 
with-the-grain solutions whenever possible.


For example, stacks appear in windows and have a "style" property to 
govern the window's mode.  So if you're making plugins you could just 
use that property, and the engine can take care of rendering the window 
as palette, modeless, or whatever you've set its style to.


The Rev IDE, however, added a custom property to mirror this natural 
behavior, the cRevLoadInfo["mode"] property.  I can't claim to 
understand why this was used instead of the built-in property already 
available, but as you poke around in Rev you'll find other similar 
things in which the IDE adds additional layers on top of things the 
engine already does quite well.


Debugging in Rev takes a similar tack.

Historically, most Rev scripting environments use the same window for 
both editing and debugging, but the two are very different tasks.


Writing scripts and tracing their execution are almost opposite tasks in 
many respects, with the only thing they have in common being a need to 
display a script in a field.


Somehow even MC was seduced by this lone commonality into thinking that 
this meant the best way to serve both of those very different tasks was 
in a single window.


But because the nature of the tasks a

Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Richmond]

On 07/26/2010 02:25 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:


 then mine, 




--
 Richard Gaskin


Boy, I must have been asleep; do tell as would love to try it.
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Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Richmond]

On 07/26/2010 01:15 PM, Francis Nugent Dixon wrote:

Hi from Beautiful Brittany,

Can anybody tell me if the IDE for RunRev is
the same on a PC as it is on a Mac ?



By "PC" do you mean Windows or Linux?

It never ceases to "tick me off" how the 'word' PC is
used for a Personal Computer that has Windows installed
as its operating system.
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Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Richard Gaskin]

Francis Nugent Dixon wrote:


Can anybody tell me if the IDE for RunRev is
the same on a PC as it is on a Mac ?

Having used PC versions of some applications,
I often found important differences from their
Mac counterparts, but I'm certainly not going to
buy the PC RunRev Studio, just for the pleasure
of finding out myself .. :>)

I need an answer from someone who has worked
them both, or at least who knows for sure.


I'm spending my time in increasingly diverse workflows, jumping between 
OS X, Win 7, and Ubuntu throughout the day.  The differences between 
them are minimal these days, and even more so in Rev.


In Rev, any IDE is merely a collection of stacks that runs on top of the 
engine.   The first IDE for this engine was MetaCard, then FreeGUI, then 
Rev, then mine, then Jerry's, and there may be others.  All just stacks 
- you can write your own too if you're so inclined; it can be kinda fun.


Since they're all just stacks, yes, the Rev IDE is one set of stacks 
that runs on all all platforms.  There's a little bit of 
platform-specific branching code in them, but not much, and overall 
you'll find the IDEs very similar from OS to OS with most of the 
differences being related to the OS itself.


For example, in OS X folks are used to seeing one menu bar that all apps 
share.  This is currently unique to OS X (though there are some noises 
from Canonical suggesting this may be adopted in Ubuntu down the road 
because it makes better use of screen real estate).


So in Windows and Linux you'll find the IDE's menu bar is attached to 
the top of the toolbar, while on Mac it competes with your app, 
sometimes showing Rev's menu bar and sometimes showing your app's (in my 
own IDE this has been dealt with in a way that saves the most screen 
real estate possible by not having a menu bar at all; think NeXT;  more 
on that later).


There are other differences as well, similarly minor yet if you spend a 
lot of time working in Rev they'll take some getting used to.


For example, older Mac keyboards still had a Return key distinct from an 
Enter key.  This distinction has been gone from the PC world for a long 
time if it ever existed at at all, and having been dropped from the Mac 
world in recent years Apple has removed one more inconsistency between 
the OSes.  Instead, there's one key which in Rev maps to the ReturnKey 
message but is labeled "Enter".  As with newer Macs, on PCs you can 
trigger the EnterKey message by using Function+Enter.


This difference means that compiling and closing scripts requires you to 
press two keys, Function+Enter, as using Enter alone will just put a 
Return character into your selection.


When you get started using Rev on Windows or Linux, if you've been using 
an older Mac you may find yourself instinctively striking Enter thinking 
it will trigger an EnterKey message to compile or close your script, but 
like any other such habits it doesn't take but a few days to pick up new 
keyboard habits.


You'll also find that the Ask and Answer dialogs flip the order of 
buttons to be consistent with Windows, in which they're laid out with 
the confirmation button on the left and the Cancel button on the right. 
 If you're accustomed to triggering those buttons with the Enter and 
Escape keys you'll find they work the same as on Mac, but if you click 
on them your muscle memory will undergo some retraining to adapt to the 
different layout.


I think you'll find other differences on the same order: relatively 
minor, and somewhat easy to adopt new habits to get used to, probably in 
just a couple days.


Echoing Andrew Kluthe's sentiments, one thing you may enjoy about the PC 
world is the nearly infinite variety of hardware you can run your OS on. 
 This isn't a Rev-specific factor at all, but for Mac folks entering 
the PC world it's a pleasant surprise:  using Apple machines is like 
driving a Bentley, quite nice if you enjoy the luxury but if you just 
need to get around town a Nissan can do quite well at a fraction of the 
price.  Having picked up some additional PCs here recently after having 
bought Macs almost exclusively for years, seeing the variety of hardware 
I can choose from at such low prices has been a very welcome eye-opener.


I hope you enjoy your exploration with a new OS.  I find switching OSes 
to be a very healthy mental exercise, putting me more in tune with all 
of my customers.  It's kinda like traveling to a foreign country in some 
respects, with similar benefits.


--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World
 Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
 Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
 revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv
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Re: IDE on a Mac and on a PC - Same ??

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi Francis,

The IDE is the same on Win and Mac but it behaves slightly differently  
depending on the platform.


The engine is also basically the same, but there are a few important  
differences due to different platforms having different APIs.


If you run into problems, it would probably help you more to describe  
the specific problem here and ask for a solution.


--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Download the Installer Maker plugin for Runtime Revolution at http://qurl.tk/ce

On 26 jul 2010, at 12:15, Francis Nugent Dixon wrote:


Hi from Beautiful Brittany,

Can anybody tell me if the IDE for RunRev is
the same on a PC as it is on a Mac ?

Having used PC versions of some applications,
I often found important differences from their
Mac counterparts, but I'm certainly not going to
buy the PC RunRev Studio, just for the pleasure
of finding out myself .. :>)

I need an answer from someone who has worked
them both, or at least who knows for sure.

Best Regards

-Francis

"Nothing should ever be done for the first time !"



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