lynnfredricks.com

I gave a short tour of Mirye Runtime Revolution at BarCamp Seattle 2008 on Sunday, under the title Programming for Non-Programmers. The previous day - Saturday - there was a presentation on various Rich Internet Application builders. Since every attendee could pick up a free copy of Revolution Media Edition, I covered mostly the features of Runtime Revolution that I wish I had known more about when I first touched it. These include:

• How the Message Path Works. Since messages may be passed or acted upon and then passed up through the application, you have so much flexibility in deciding where you put your scripts.
• What You Can do with the Message Box. It is so very extremely easy to create a new object in Revolution - “new button” in the message box gives you a new button. It is easy to forget that the Revolution engine is interactive.
• Groups as Backgrounds. Groups are powerful, but they are confusing if you futz about with them when all you need is a repeated object or background that appears on all cards in a particular stack or sub-stack.
• Custom Properties. It is easy to forget that if a property doesn’t already exist, you aren’t stuck.
• It Probably Does What You Want Already. I had a lot of questions about FTP and other internet protocols, all of which I know Revolution supports, and probably not all that less advanced than those RIAs.