Jacque you always provide so much, thank you.
-=>JB<=-
On Oct 12, 2008, at 11:07 AM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
-= JB =- wrote:
I have only been using Revolution for less than a year now and before
that I used hyperCard. I know about MetaCard but I thought it was
replaced by Rev. So where do I get the MetaCard IDE and after I
get it how do I install it properly?
You can download the MC IDE setup stack, and it will download the
latest IDE for you and install your copy of the Rev engine into it:
<http://www.hyperactivesw.com/revnet/metacard_setup.zip>
The process is all automated. I suggest including the Rev
dictionary option at the bottom of the setup card, since the native
MC dictionary is years out of date.
I have noticed others on the list mention they use MetaCard too.
Will
someone please explain why people use MetaCard even though they
keep using the latest version of Rev.
MC IDE is just a very stripped-down set of stacks that allow a
different way of working with the engine. The primary difference is
that the IDE is very minimal -- for example, there is no user
interface for most of the properties you see in Rev's property
inspector. Instead, a minimal property inspector lets you set the
most-used properties, but for others you need to know they exist
and use the message box to set them (or install a third-party or
original property inspector of your own.) The object browser offers
less functionality than the application browser in Rev -- it shows
only the current card objects (but on the other hand, that's
usually all I'm interested in.) There is no interface at all for
many things, such as removing a substack, deleting a stack from
RAM, most preferences, etc. For these things you use the message
box and you must know the commands. You can write your own plugins
to do what some of the Rev IDE does if you like. All the MC IDE
stacks are similarly terse. They expect that you already know the
capabilities of the engine and are comfortable working with the
command line. The engine was originally written for Linux/Unix and
the MC IDE reflects this level of comfort.
I frequently work in both IDEs depending on the stack I'm working
with. For example, Rev tracks when a field has changed and puts up
its "do you want to save" dialog if you change any text in a field.
MC IDE does not. For those stacks that routinely change text
temporarily in a field, I always launch MC because I don't want the
interruption of dismissing the spurious dialog. (I have a small
word processing stack, for example, that works with text files. I
don't want the actual word processing stack marked as "dirty" just
because I typed temporary text into the main field.)
While the disadvantage (or maybe it's an advantage) is that you
need to have a good grasp of what the engine can do and the UI is
minimal, the advantages are that there is almost no interference
from the IDE at all. A tiny frontscript and a small backscript are
the only insertions. The IDE does not get in the way, and you can
be fairly certain that if you see a bug in the MC IDE it is more
likely to be an engine bug than an IDE problem. The freedom to do
what you want without interference is much greater in the MC IDE,
with the caveat that with freedom comes responsibility -- you can
more easily lose your work or wreck the stack because the
protections that the Rev IDE offers aren't there.
For my workflow, there are advantages to both IDEs and I switch
frequently between them.
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
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