Seems to be in a similar category like the naming of "Revolution", which could be understood as a goal to be reached somewhere in the future and as sort of a promise that its developers want to reach as soon as possible, but at present are still prevented to reach because of a number of self-inflicted obstacles coming up in the course of struggling with principles of design and strategies of programming. Hopefully they - and we - will get there eventually - supported by engaged discussions about "bugs", use of the IDE, education etc. etc. going on on this list.
"Dreamcard" is probably supposed to conjure up a feeling that this product can be used in a "dream-like" way, as a solution to programming problems you have always dreamed about and wanted to have. I indeed hope there will be such a product in the future.
At present - in its very first initial stage of development (the development will hopefully progress very fast) - "Dreamcard" is just "Revolution" minus some - not altogether unimportant - features and an oversized seven and a half megabyte Dreamcard Player as a necessary add-on (7.4 MB on Windows).
I am confident that it is possible to build a much smaller "player" - and that anybody in possession of a Revolution or Metacard version that allows standalones would be able to build a small player (for the Dreamcard users) in a couple of minutes or at most in half an hour.
I repeat here my post that addressed such issues, which I sent on Wednesday, Sept 1, under subject "Dreamcard Player" and which got somewhat lost in the turmoil of the Dreamcard discussion on the list:
As Kevin Miller wrote on Sept 1:
The products are differentiated by the license key you enter. If you requested Dreamcard you will have a Dreamcard key, and if you launch the program you will notice the splash screen says Dreamcard.
Another of the differences apparently is (I did not yet try Rev with a 10-day Dreamcard key) that you cannot build standalones with Dreamcard, but have to use the platform-specific Dreamcard Player.
I downloaded the Windows Dreamcard Player, which is 7.49 as "revplayersetup.exe" and needs 7.41 MB hard-disk space after installing. This means that you either have to add these 7.4 MB to the stacks produced with Dreamcard (if you want to distribute your stacks) or have to ask potential users to download the 7.4 MB Dreamcard Player from the RunRev site.
One question I want to ask here is, whether it wouldn't be possible to considerately downsize the Dreamcard Player? A "raw" player produced with Revolution or Metacard would have a size of somewhat slightly more than the engine size, meaning about 1.6 MB in unzipped format. With such a "raw" player you of course would need to move all necessary resources (dialogs, icons etc.) into the stacks before distribution. Would this be possible in Dreamcard?
My MC-Player - that also runs Rev stacks - has a zipped size of 881 KB and contains all necessary icons, dialogs, cursors, libURL (see <http://www.sanke.org>, page "samples").
The "Read_Me_First" of Dreamcard Player 1.0 states:
"The Dreamcard player allows you to access programs created with Dreamcard.
The Player is free. To use it, double click it, then either open the
Dreamcard program you want to run using the Open button to the right of the
address bar, or navigate to a program stored online by clicking on the User
Spaces button."
When I double-click the installed Dreamcard Player on Windows XP, nothing of the above happens, in fact nothing at all happens!
The only form I can use the Dreamcard Player is to drag stacks onto its Revolution icon, which indeed then opens Rev and Metacard stacks. Unfortunately, however, no mouse cursors are visible inside the stack area of the opened stacks and you need to move the mouse "blindly". Am I missing something here?
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke <http://www.sanke.org>
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