revUp | Issue 63

Despite all the doom and gloom that seems to be around, 2009 is opening well for Revolution and revUp! I thought I'd kick off this brand new year with a quick roundup of what's going on in the Revolution world, plus some user feedback on the great add-ons now listed in RevSelect.

David Simpson has been waving the flag for Revolution at MacWorld this January. He sent me this lovely picture of his booth:

He writes "[the picture] shows my brother Ron Simpson, and my friend Larry Tanikawa helping at my booth during the show.

A couple of Revolution customers stopped by to say hello, including: Mark Wieder, Lynn Fredricks and Bill Vlahos."

RevSelect continues to thrive and grow, I'm delighted to announce our latest new vendor and product. Eric Chatonet brings you ListMagic, already causing a stir in the Revolution community.

Talking of RevSelect, don't miss out on our fantastic Megabundle offer. Its still (just) not too late to benefit from it. If you somehow missed seeing this and are wondering what it is, our RevSelect vendors have got together and allowed us to bundle all their amazing software with a Revolution license, giving you huge savings on the products bought separately. This offer ends at midnight tomorrow, so you might want to check it out.

The RevSelect products are carefully selected to save you time, money, and help you get the best out of Revolution. Sure, pretty much anything these products do could be done from scratch in Revolution (well, they're mostly written in Revolution!) but how long would it take you? Would you think of all the amazing optimisations these expert developers have worked in for you? Wouldn't you rather just plug in all their hard work, and play? Here are some of the things that you, the users, have said about a few of the RevSelect products available to you:

"Since I've installed GLX2, I can't even imagine writing code in Revolution without it. It makes everything more efficient when coding.

Some unique features that I appreciate a lot:
• Navigation through a script is blazing fast with the help of:
- the "Handler list": clicking on a handler's name scrolls instantly in the script
editor to that handler.
- and "Handler links": in the script, handlers are shown as links. Clicking on
a link scrolls the editor to that handler.

• Switching between a stack and several scripts is very easy because all scripts are located in the same tabbed code browser.

• Only one script window, compared to several (it can be a pain to find your stack window!).

• Comparing two portions of a script is sometimes useful and managed in an elegant way without having to scroll up and down and having to remember what you've just read—thanks to the split script panes.

• Clairvoyance is a great feature that avoids bugs due to misspelling a command, function or variable's name.

• Auto-completion works even with your own variables—without having to declare them! No more "what was exactly was the name I gave to that variable?"

• A last word: it's design is beautiful!"
Éric Miclo - Conseiller Pédagogique, Éducation Nationale

"Since purchasing ScreenSteps I actually make documentation instead of just thinking I should. ScreenSteps saves so much time, and takes so little effort, it's incredible. And the result looks really nice to boot."
Yuan-Yuan Sun

"I own a consulting firm and for years have documented processes for our clients the old fashion way of using a page-layout program. Now that we have found ScreenSteps, we can create professional looking, easy to use documentation for our clients and internal use in a fraction of the time it used to take. We can then take it a step further and export the HTML content for use in our Wiki. We love ScreenSteps!"
Rob Calvert, Second Son Consulting, Inc.

"... starting into Revolution was a brand new experience. I am working on a program I hope to market to the world. I have a vision and fairly concrete plan of what I want to achieve, I definitely don't know the details of how to get there with Revolution.

Trying to develop my program as efficiently as I can, it has been really useful to have someone to guide me through the conceptual and interface quirks of this new world. The fact that Jerry happens to be the genius who wrote GLX2, an alternate (and vastly superior) IDE for Revolution, that even RunRev recommends, is a distinct bonus. I know that the advice Jerry gives, derived from developing useful and professional-looking products, is solid and immediately applicable. The opportunity to learn from the best is rare and valued in any field. Anyone considering taking their Revolution programming to the next level would do well to work with Jerry and his Mentoring Program."
Douglas Alder

"I was almost 100% sure that this could not be done. You had a solution in minutes. Thanks. Animation Engine has been a lifesaver. "
Max, read the full post on the Revolution Forums

I made a picture (basically a circle with serrated edge to look like thumb knurls) of a knob (it happened to be 60x60 pixels) and a small circle a few pixels across to be the marker dot on the knob, and imported those to the card.

I added a button "btnDot", set its icon to be the id of the dot image, which I hid. I set the button to be transparent and dragged it over the image "imgRotatingKnob".

Then it was literally a case of just setting its constraint, and adding a handler, ie

set the constrainCircular of button "btnDot" to the loc of \
image "imgRotatingKnob",20

on constrainCircularCallback
   set the angle of image "Knob60" to abs (360 - findAngle (the \
   loc of me, the loc of image "imgRotatingKnob"))
end constrainCircularCallback

How brilliant and efficient is that?! (One day I'll be an AE expert, I promise. Up to now I've only ever dabbled with a few things, but everything I've seen has astonished me how clean and effective you can make handlers in AE.) "
Sparkout, read the full post on the Revolution Forums

I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to 2009. We have lots of good and exciting things planned for the year, most of which I can't tell you about yet ;). But be sure you will hear about them as they happen via revUp!

I recently sent out a call for articles to some of you - thanks for the great response. We have some exciting articles lined up for the coming months, but of course we're always looking for more. If you have an idea for an article, or some news you'd like to share with the community, please contact us and see your name in lights in a future edition of revUp.