I'm delighted to be able to bring you some news about the latest session signing for our conference. The pre-day for the conference will be dual session. The first of these tracks will be a hands on coding session. Runtime Revolution's Mark Waddingham will be available, along with other Revolution luminaries, to help you with your coding issues, and answer technical questions submitted in advance (further details on this track will be announced soon). The second of these tracks will be taken up by an intensive course for Revolution beginners, led by none other than Jacqueline Landman Gay.

About Jacque

Jacqueline Landman Gay is one of the most prominent and experienced members of the Revolution community.

Jacque was a Speech Pathology major and graduated with a BA in Communications. Of her degree she says "I learned a lot about how people communicate, and that translates surprisingly well into software considerations. Software is nothing more than an interface to help people communicate with computers, and the more you know about how people want to interact, the better your software is."

She got her first Mac SE in the same year her son was born, and became instantly hooked on HyperCard. Within a year she had started HyperActive Software, now a thriving consulting business.

Nowadays Revolution is her tool of choice. Most of her work involves solving a particular in-house problem for a company. Of this she says "Some of these companies could never have afforded to invest the dollars for a C++ programmer to write some of the things I've written. But they can afford me, because I can do in days what other programmers would need weeks or months to accomplish."

Jacque spent several years prominently managing the HyperCard forum at AOL. She also worked with Apple on the infamously never released HyperCard 3. Since then she has become deeply involved in Revolution, providing technical support to Revolution customers via the use-revolution mailing list voluntarily, as well as using it in her business and providing technical support on a contract basis to Runtime Revolution customers.

About the session

This day long tutorial is designed to let participants learn by doing. If you've never used Revolution, or you're right at the start of the learning curve, this course is for you. At each phase of the instruction there is a hands-on exercise that lets students practice the concepts covered. Each exercise builds on the previous one so that by the end of the workshop students will have a completed, working Revolution project. Your friendly instructors will be available at all times to guide students through the exercises. Questions and individual innovation are encouraged. Come along and learn from the experts!

Topical Outline

I. Introduction To Revolution

A walk around the interface, explaining the tools at your disposal and helping you to understand the card/stack metaphor.

II. Revolution Objects - The building blocks of your program

This section will show you how to use fields, buttons, player, backgrounds, groups and other interface objects. It will also address the Properties of objects.

III. Revolution Scripting Language

A discussion of the language, syntax, message box and debugging. This section will also cover managing data and printing.

IV. Revolution and Multimedia

Here you will learn about styled text, vector graphics, audio and video.

V. Revolution on the Internet

How to make your application web-aware, covering html formatting text, and integrating web-based resources.

VI. Preparing Your Program for Distribution

Finally a look at proofreading, polishing and testing your stack across platforms.