Rev Studio $50 until June 14

Yup. Build neat little Mac standalone applications with the world's easiest to learn programming language, RevTalk!

Kick the tires of its free sibling, RevMedia, but don't spend too long because this offer is set to sail into the sunset in less than two weeks.

We're talking about pizza and beer money here... a serious no brainer. RevStudio normally retails for US$249, hence slashing that first digit makes it a serious price-point contender against its rivals. For more information on how the various Rev products differ in terms of features, see here.

Basically, if you don't need seriously geeky things like externals or Oracle database connectivity (and if the mention of these things makes your eyes glaze over, you probably don't need them) and would prefer to be able to deliver a standalone executable application which does not need a player object, RevStudio may be for you. If you don't know what an SSL is, don't spend the extra $$$ on the Enterprise version. Other funky new things I still haven't wrapped my feeble brain around -- datagrid, I'm looking at you! -- you may also not need.

One limitation which must be pointed out is that you can only deliver a standalone application on the same platform that you write it on (but I don't think that precludes delivering for the other platforms using the company's free stack player). In normal human English, this means that if you have a Mac at home, you'd better be making standalones for a classroom of Macs and similarly for the other supported platforms.

Still -- have any oldies but goodies Hypercard stacks you've been trying to bring into the 21st century? Get this product. Fast. Because you can convert them into native Rev stack files (especially plain-vanilla Hypercard stacks without those pesky XCMDs & XCFNs).

Basically, as the company itself so aptly notes, You don't need a computer science degree to get things done with Revolution. So, what are you waiting for?

Hypercard, Hyperstudio, and why Revolution Can't, or Won't, Compete

It's an interesting component of modern culture that views anything that didn't hatch yesterday as completely obsolete, foreign, and useless for study. This regrettably leads us to recreate the wheel over and over again, and sometimes what results is simply NOT superior to that which preceded it in ways we should have seen coming but didn't because we decided it was uncool to look back in time.

Thus is is with the the Hyper-word that must not be uttered. If all you can look back and see are 1-bit icons and the floppy-swap and are willing to dismiss it at that, then you never really did ever "get it." And, btw, those 1-bit icons were and still are vastly superior to the load of 256-color icon crap that shipped with MetaCard and is shipping still with Rev. You think the Stack - Card metaphor is an embarrassment? Have any of you even LOOKED AT those MC icons?!? They look like they were drawn by 5-year-olds on a few too many acid drops. And, btw, we're talking 5-year-olds with ZERO artistic talent. On acid.

But I digress. When reminded that, at its height, the Hyper-thing was quite possibly THE most popular development environment (Can Rev say that now?) and attracted probably the greatest numbers of non-/novice programmers than any development environment before or since (does anyone even come close btw?), people's responses are: 'but where are they now?', or, 'oh, but those were the days of the floppy-swap,' or the subtly-deceptive argument-changing dismissal that such is the realm of the geriatric set that's clearly not with the program (pardon the pun).

The point that lots of people are blissful to ignore is that Hypercard (there, I've said it!) got lots of things right that, 20 years later, nearly everybody else, including Rev, insists on getting wrong by design (except for a certain competitor whose product sells extremely well). Hypercard succeeded wildly in getting people -- normal humans even! -- to use their *programming* product in a very short period of time. While other people wonder, 'where are those people now?', I wonder, 'how the hell did they do that?!'

And that's why HC is not irrelevant: how the hell did they do that, indeed! We like to think that todays user is so much more computer sophisticated than was the typical user 20+ years ago, a bit of back-patting that study after study indicates is simply dead wrong. We may have more computers in more homes and more schools but, other than surfing the web and sitting on Facebook all day, today's computer owner doesn't use his/her computer for anything markedly more complex or different than did the typical user of 20+ years ago. So, the idea that we need to explain things less because "they" know more? Fail.

20+ years ago the HC team understood that they had to make programming look fun and attractive, with a gentle learning curve and lots of ready-made things to copy <--> paste into new stacks, replete with clipart so that the user didn't get distracted when going off and ending up chasing the pretty butterfly while looking for artwork.

Today many consider such things to be coddling, and new Rev users with questions are tersely told to go read the documentation. I'll say it again: without a printed set of language documentation (WITH AN INDEX), online docs are of EXTREMELY LIMITED VALUE because you can't look up what you don't know to look up. The language model is sufficiently different from other programming languages that even programmers coming from other languages find using the documentation difficult, and people who lack a programming background altogether are likely to find the docs entirely unusable. Which means they drift away, because there's no substantial explanation of how to do things that anchors them. Buh-bye, new user. By design. Because we think they need to grow more hair on their chests and suck it up and become "real" programmers.

Trevor's lessons stuff is a HUGE step in the right direction, but consider this: you have to (a) know they exist to (b) go find them (no small feat, given how wildly Rev's website changes with each new rebranding) and then (c) search them, at which point you've likely lost considerably more than 50% of those new users. Considerably more. Do I need say it again? CONSIDERABLY MORE, like, nearly all of them. The HC dev team knew to have stuff up-front and visible, always and obviously accessible. They even recognized this importance after the development of that new-fangled internet thingy that people keep telling me about (I think I need to go swig a bottle of Geritol before I can grok that whole thing).

So, it would seem that there's a few things we can learn from 20+ years ago -- Don't intimidate people and make them feel stupid; DO give them a small subset of all the things they need to get started without leaving the IDE; DO provide a printed set of language and learning materials; make all this stuff obvious and visible; and speak to them in their, not your, language.

Think I'm going overboard a bit with the clipart & stuff? How many teachers do you think choose Hyperstudio (http://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/) at US$90 over Rev Media, which is FREE? Seems insane, doesn't it?! Visit their website and you'll see why they pick Hyperstudio. In droves. Look at the screenshot: Hyperstudio's not too embarrassed by the blast from the past of using a hand versus an arrow to indicate one particular state or modality over the other, because Hyperstudio knows that you don't use two very similar-looking icons to indicate two very different states. And Hyperstudio knows it because HC knew it. And because Hyperstudio has decided not to be embarrassed by yesterday's truth, they sell way more licenses to normal humans than does Rev, even though I think educators would be better off using Rev.

Hyperstudio also boasts podcasting support, importing from iTunes, Keynote, and YouTube, easy card navigation in its production environment, and text niceties such as kerning (how long have people been drooling for that in Rev?!). Like Rev, it has a plugin allowing Hyperstudio projects to be run in Safari. But, more significantly, it includes 1,300 clipart images, 500 background images, 200 animations, 280 sounds, and 30 movies, including QTVR; it imports PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PICT & PSD for images, and MP3, AAC, WAV (I'll bet it's wayyyy less wonky than Rev is with WAV files), AIFF, M4A, M4B, M4P, SND, CDDA & AU for audio, and MOV, AVI, MPEG and QTVR for movie/video. Now I'm not claiming that Rev needs to match them, number for number, on included media, but it really does need to not be a string of 0s in all those categories if Rev wishes to compete in the educational market. Hyperstudio was smart: It looked at what worked for Hypercard and then did that in spades. It wasn't too cool to look back in time. And it shows because it sells.

And, another reason why educators take to Hyperstudio in droves? It has something else that Hypercard had and Rev sadly does not: a passionate former and current userbase with an emotional connection to the product and the willingness to be unpaid evangelists for the company and the product. And this is a company/product that really doesn't badly need such a thing, having few to no real competitors, unlike Rev, which is up against a bazillion other programming languages, most of which have been around longer and have significantly more adherents. And, as its wiki entry notes, Hyperstudio and its users aren't too proud to acknowledge Hyperstudio as a Hypercard clone. Indeed, on the webpages of Hyperstudio fans you will find frequent mention of Hypercard, and not in a negative manner either. Oh, and did I mention that Hyperstudio is wildly popular? Hmmm.... wonder why.

Higher education, teacher ed programs, and K-12 in general *lurves* Hyperstudio:

http://www.sillybilly.com/abcd123.html
http://www.cue.org/cuetoyou/hyperstudio
http://nschubert.home.mchsi.com/education/HSProjects.html
http://mathforum.org/sum95/suzanne/colortips.html
http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourFames.cgi?tour_id=14179
http://www.k12.hi.us/~mstlaure/tlcf2000/fun_hs.htm
--this site has an example of menus that make sense to educators.
http://geologyonline.museum.state.il.us/tools/lessons/8.6/lesson.pdf
http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej33/m2.html
--this site explains in copious detail why the edu community likes Hyperstudio.

Check out the testimonials and endorsements, and, ask yourself what does Hyperstudio do for $90 that Rev Media, for free, couldn't do better, and then consider why it is Rev currently cannot compete in that market, despite everything we've been able to observe about such software and the success of similar products over the last 20 years.

But, of course, few here care about the education market, so let me appeal to your base, my-bottom-line instincts: how many of your bugs might get fixed with the additional income brought in by hundreds of thousands of teachers buying a slightly modified Studio, based upon what went right with Hypercard?

Is it really worth it to diss Hypercard and its model? I think not.

My Revlet Works!!! aka getting the current plugin

Hot damn! It works after all :-D

Turns out that my silly little Plurals program now works online. I thought it didn't but it seems that I didn't have the current plugin. Silly me!


You can find it here

I'm doin' the Snoopy Dance!

From the FROM GOD'S MOUTH TO OUR EARS department:

"I'm especially impressed with the way you've preserved the same feel and flavor of HyperCard even in all the new features you've added and revised... When I finally got to Revolution it was like coming home again... You have created a very worthy successor to HyperCard, the only one I've seen which captures, preserves and seamlessly extends everything I thought was great about the original." -- Dan Winkler

And to think -- we wouldn't even know about this little gem if not for a recently spectacular little flamefest on the Rev use-list. That flamefest partially reignited the debate regarding whether we should be proud of Revolution's Hypercard origins or ashamed. You can read more about Hypercard here. People who are embarrassed by that lineage should just go away and program in C. Seriously. It's snobbery like that (produced in metric boatloads over on a recent /. thread on Rev ) that keeps people, especially normal humans, from even trying to make their own solutions.

From the wikipedia entry above (which is itself ironic given that the first wiki was produced as a Hypercard stack):

HyperTalk was sufficiently popular that one of its main uses was not as a database, but as a programming tool that empowered ordinary computer users. Thousands of "stacks" were written and distributed as "stackware" in the years when HyperCard was widely available. As stated above, programming "for the rest of us", that is, for non-professionals, allowed many thousands of personal applications to be created by individuals with a need for personal software solutions.

You or I are unlikely to make anything super-duper great, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the world for "little and gets the job done" ;-)

TwistAWord Now Available as a Facebook App!

The TwistAWord educational game/app, reviewed below, is now available online in a limited form Facebook web application. Check it out!

http://apps.facebook.com/twistaword/

To play the online version of the game, you will need to download the free web revlet plug-in. The IE browser, notoriously wonky and non-standards compliant, isn't supported by this plug-in, but FireFox and Safari are.

Enjoy!

Making Plurals

Okay, I was recently presented with an excuse to use Rev when my kids (eight year-olds) brought home a bit of language arts homework that they didn't understand on plural form construction.

Here's how the worksheet presented things:



A word that means one of something is singular. A word that means more than one is plural. Most singular words are made plural by adding s. Most words that end in s, ss, x, ch, and sh are made plural by adding es. Form the plural of each word below by adding s or es.


button_____

boss_____

wish_____

robot_____

clock_____

circus_____.


BORING! There are no illustrating examples. This presentation earns a huge FAIL from an instructional design perspective. My little boy was very frustrated. So, I dusted off my brain and tried to remember what little I used to know about scripting to try to come up with something better. Here is the Mac OSX result and here is the Windows result (I don't know if the latter works as I don't have a PC to try it on).

What I did.

It's clear that a few examples were needed for demonstration purposes. It also seemed reasonable to have them do more than 6 sample problems (so I did 12 instead). I decided to use two different typefaces: one for instructions/presentation/rule articulation and a second for examples/problems. Since I was short on originality, I decided once again to use a chalkboard motif, which makes the first font choice fitting: Chalkboard (on the Mac). Chalkboard was selected less for its name than for the fact that it looks like the sort of printing that children are taught: simple lines, no serifs, no funny-looking 'a's like the one I just typed. As California's third grade curriculum also introduces cursive writing at this level, my second font was a strange thing called #PilGi, which was the closest thing I could find to a cursive handwriting font pre-installed on my Mac. The chalkboard image I found after a quick search for public domain clipart although I could also have just gone and photographed an actual chalkboard (they really do still exist!).

Probably the most time consuming aspect of this project was turning all the text into images instead of using Rev's built-in field objects. Even where the same font exists on, say, both the Mac and Windows, you cannot be assured that it will look the same on both (spacing will be very different), thus as I wanted things to look the same, all text had to be turned into images, and transparent PNGs at that (so the chalkboard would show through). I fired up GraphicConverter, but (a) it's been increasingly wonky with each new release, and (b) I noticed right away that text at really large point sizes (I think for the title screen, it's something like 120 points) is horribly pixellated, so I needed to use a program that had some Photoshop-like filter features. GIMP, a free open-source software program with Photoshop-like capabilities, was suggested. I don't know how GIMP is on Linux or Windows, but the Mac version kinda sucks, although I've been told it sucks less than it formerly did. On the Mac, GIMP requires the X11 environment (instructions are on the website), and it does not look like a standard Mac app (the accelerator key is control and not the apple key; the application's menu bar is not anchored to the top like it's supposed to be but is instead attached to the document window). But, hey -- it's free and I managed!

The first few screens are timed presentations of information (the rules and examples). Timed means using the "wait" command. Alot. Well, turns out that this can sometimes cause problems, and so I got chewed out over using it ;-) But, as I couldn't figure another way of doing the same thing, I compromised and used "wait with messages" (but, to be honest, even that still caused problems with the revlet version -- the web deployable one). However, the Mac version worked and, as my kids needed it this week and not next year, good enough will have to suffice.

On to the drill-and-kill! One of the things I didn't like about the kids' handout was the presentation of the rule and the exception. Even in print, I think I would have tried to separate the two so that it was clear there were two states or cases or rules -- you either add "s" or you add "es". I think it should have been two separate paragraphs to avoid the whole Hamlet's "words, words, words..." phenomenon. So, for the testing component I presented rule #1 (most words take an "s") on the left in its own box-demarcation, and rule #2 similarly on the right. Users are presented with three nouns per screen followed by an "s" and an "es" button and told to click on the appropriate one.

Are they dead yet? So far, I hadn't done much to mitigate the BORING! factor. So, I went back and added sound (text-to-speech; the revSpeak command [side rant: why couldn't they have just used "speak"?!!]) for the presentation and the instructions. Using buttons for testing meant nothing had to be dragged around on-screen by little uncoordinated hands using computer mice that are wayyyy too big for them. As an added bonus, kids LOVE to click buttons (watch one in the elevator some time; my kids fight over who gets to press which button). If the appropriate button is selected, an applause sound is played and a dialogue box thrown up which confirms that the child has chosen the appropriate ending. If the wrong button is selected, a goofy 'you lose' kind of sound is played ("play audioclip" command) and a dialogue box appears telling the child that this was not the correct choice, what the correct plural is, and why. This drove my husband batty, all that dialogue box confirmation, but kids aren't adults and, well, it's another button they get to click! I also then (with more "wait" commands) try to subtly hilite the appropriate rule box, but I'm not certain that it's not too subtle. At the end, the student's percentage rate correct is shown.

What went right.

It didn't take too long to find royalty-free or public domain images and sounds (I think I paid $10 for the you-lose sound but I liked it and didn't want to spend a half-hour looking for something public domain). "Wait" didn't screw up anything on the Mac side. I managed not to do anything terribly stupid. The kids actually liked it (in fact, I finally had to shoo them away, saying "let mommy finish it!!!). I actually finished it.

What went wrong.

"Wait" screwed up the revlet. Because I didn't script it terribly efficiently, writing the "yea" and "boo" buttons only once and using "the target" to exhibit the appropriate behavior, at some point I ended up having to go through all 12 sets of buttons to see where I forgot to increment the counter for things like moving to the next screen and getting the right math with respect to percentage of correct choices. Oh well. I lived to tell the tale.

What I'd do differently.

Use "the target". Randomize the presentation of the 12 problem/words in the testing area. Maybe make the cursive text on the second screen larger. Find a better cursive handwriting font. Pay somebody to tell me how to get around the "wait" problem. ;-)

New Educational Game Made in Revolution

Recently-released TwistAWord is a new educational game made with Revolution and indicative of what a person can do with a little time one their hands (well, okay, maybe more than a little time).


It is advertised as a fun word game for children from 8 to 88 years (and up)... Cool design, funny sound effects and a competitive element make improving your language skills a treat! . TwistAWord utilizes a corkboard and paper scrap motif; its object is for the player to correctly assemble a phrase's words from the presented scrambled order. Hints can be requested:



Four levels are supported as are phrases in eight languages (Catalonian, Danish, English, French, German, Latin, Portuguese or Spanish). The game is visually appealing and, had I not turned my sound down, no doubt my children would have excited by the game's sound effects.

If you are wondering whether you as a normal human being (e.g., non-programmer) could make something similar, the creator of TwistAWord described its development as thus The scripting is laborious, tedious, but not very complicated, although I used a few tricks one might not immediately think of... The basics of the game are still relatively simple.

TwistAWord is available for Windows or Mac OS X, and you can download a trial version which will quit after ten minutes of play. For a limited time, it is also available at a 33% discount for a total purchase price of slightly less than US$15.