Rev Review

[Richard Gaskin]

Frank Leahy wrote:

[...a lot of excellent stuff snipped here because I've already exceeded my
bandwidth allocation on this list today <g>)]

I like your comments on ways to improve the RunRev Web site and would
encourage you to forward them to Lorin Rivers at <lorin at runrev.com> as I'm
sure that refining Web site is an ongoing interest.

As for RealBASIC, to be honest I don't have much experience with it.  As a
much lower-level tool I'm sure there some things that can be done there,
such as direct OS API calls, that would be harder in Rev.  But since Rev
deploys to 12 platforms, it's relatively rare that folks would want to make
direct API calls and there's an externals mechanism for that.

I've not had occassion to use RB to do any real work.  I looked at it years
ago but it seemed to take more code than C to get much of the same
functionality, and if I'm going to work at a low level I might as well just
stick with C. 

Besides, in five years with the Rev VM I've not needed to write externals; I
spend far more time rewriting older Mac-specific externals in native
Transcript for universal deployment.  Just the same, I've had two magazine
writers mistake my product for having been written in C (which is not far
off the mark, since most of the work is done by the C-based VM).

As for availability of plugins, yes the Rev community is overlooking an
opportunity.  There are a lot of great tools and libraries for Rev, but few
are posted to sites like VersionTracker, Tucows, Download.com, etc.
BlueMango's done a great job with marketing their QT externals (I came
across its VersionTracker listing yesterday), but few others have been
distributed in those channels.  I'm preparing some of my plugins for posting
to those sites, but to be honest between client work and being unnecessarily
verbose here I haven't taken the time, opting to just drop them in RevNet
instead.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
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