rpitcairn wrote:Richard,
Thanks, I understand. I understand also that the rules are evolving. It might make sense for me to learn to use Rev Studio and later, if things change in that direction, to go to RevMobile.
That may be a great way to get started. To get the most out of RevMobile it'll be good to have some experience with Rev on the desktop you're more familiar with first.
And by the time you're ready to try RevMobile, it may be that either Apple has loosened up with their unusual restrictions about the narrow range of languages you're allowed to write in for App Store submissions, or perhaps more likely Android will have overtaken iOS' lead in the market and you'd have more potential customers with RevMobile's Android support anyway.
I try to keep up on the recent shifts in mobile market share with this query in Google News at least once a week, and each week it seems Android is gaining significant ground:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=iOS+And ... rket+share
Over the last six months iOS' rate of growth has dropped from a high of 34% down to 23%, and during the same period Android growth has exploded by 886%.
http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/08/0 ... -globally/
With this radical sea change, two major analyst firms (Gartner and iSuppli) now predict Android will completely overtake iOS in total market share by 2012:
http://www.macworld.com/article/143170/ ... droid.html
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/ ... s_in_2012/
But in the meantime, you have some work to do getting started with Rev.
I don't know if you remember my participation in the SC community back in the Allegiant days, but around 1998 my clients started to require that I help them get their apps to Windows so I had to move the bulk of my work from SC's excellent Mac-exclusive system to the cross-platform MetaCard engine (which has since been acquired by RunRev to become the Rev that we know today).
I can tell you from experience that the transition offers a lot of opportunities to leverage your SuperTalk knowledge, but is not without a fair bit of "unlearning". Most of the differences you'll encounter moving to Rev deal with Rev's multi-platform nature. More than a few things will seem odd or even "wrong" compared to SC at first as you get started, but the more you come to understand the rationale behind the design decisions the more you'll appreciate that most of those decisions were reasonably well thought out ways to handle platform differences.
If you're considering Windows deployments I can't stress enough how helpful it is to have a Windows system available to you and to spend some good time with it. Even virtualization isn't bad these days under Parallels, BootCamp, or similar tools, but spending time with Windows will help a lot in understanding Rev's cross-platform nature, and will be essential if you want to deploy apps there that look and feel as right for that platform as your Mac versions do.
I've worked with a lot of clients providing training and porting services for their SC apps over the years, and I've found that two of the biggest differences between SC and Rev that cause a lot of initial confusion are menus and groups (what SC calls "backgrounds").
There's too much to cover about those in one post and this one has gotten too long already, but I would encourage you to explore Rev with a simple project that you don't care much about first to get a feel for the lay of the land, playing around with the new objects and concepts on something very simple that doesn't matter if you screw it up.
With a little play time devoted to that sort of exploratory learning, you'll come to understand some of the key differences that can make the difference in porting your real projects successfully.
And of course you have this forum at your disposal, so please take advantage of it. Like the SC community, the Rev community has a cadre of ol' timers who've already made most of the mistakes you might make as you get started, and are happy to help guide your learning progress with tips, code, and Bernd here may even write a stack or two for you as an example (he's been enormously generous that way with some of the newcomers here).
Welcome aboard. Now that you've been warned about the "unlearning curve", hopefully you'll find your Rev evaluation rewarding and perhaps even liberating. There's a certain magic feeling to clicking the Build button in the standalone maker and suddenly having apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux on your desktop ready to go.