Product Reviews

Making software is just for geeks, right? No, actually that's wrong. Building your own software is often the best way to make computers do what you want, without compromise.

With Revolution 1.0, you can do exactly that, creating custom software tools and applications not only for your own Mac, but also your clients' Macs, PCs and even Unix-based client and server machines.

More importantly, Revolution's English-like scripting language and visual layout tools mean users can get to grips with making things that work, whether they're complete novices or experienced coders.

Revolution is a rapid application development tool with virtually no practical limits. We tried it out, both for producing our own custom utilities and as a professional prototyping and rapid application development tool. It proved to be extraordinarily flexible.

Production in Revolution follows the traditional concept of cards, backgrounds and stacks. Graphics, buttons and fields are placed on the cards and backgrounds using simple layout tools. Graphics can be complex vector shapes or full 24-bit colour bitmaps, and image formats, including animated GIF files, can be used in layouts.

Going further, QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies are fully supported and can be manipulated by scripts on the fly. Vector graphics can be directly manipulated at the individual point level.

For those interested in more prosaic tasks, Revolution's support for true data arrays means complex information relationships can be set up with ease, and lookups performed at high speed.

It excels at Internet-related tasks. Network socket addressing is directly supported, making it possible to create full Internet utility features, and even server-based applications, with relatively little effort.

Key Revolution production areas are handled by 'managers'. For example, as Revolution can be used to produce applications for the Unix and Windows operating systems as well as for the Mac, menu handling is a potential problem area. To counter this, the Menu Manager provides a complete set of tools for creating complete menu structures and helps users make menus in the appropriate way.

The Animation Manager provides a full timeline

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animation interface for moving and altering multiple objects at will. It isn't as good as Macromedia Director, but it provides enough for most requirements and its scripting language is both easier and richer than Director's Lingo.

Quintessentially English

The scripting language, called Transcript, brings the Revolution productions to life. It is relatively similar to English, with commands written in sentence-like structures rather than built from symbols. It's a rich language, covering tasks from multimedia and graphics-oriented control, to database access and manipulation, and even offers a measure of hardware control.

Anyone experienced in other script-level languages will find it relatively familiar, and those used to more opaque programming languages should find it a breath of fresh air.

Good documentation and help is vital for this kind of product, and Revolution scores well in this respect. The Revolution mailing list provides a good source of support from Runtime and its growing community of users. Those with the professional version of Revolution get a year of direct email support. The on-screen guides and reference works are comprehensive: as well as a script language dictionary, there's a usage reference encyclopaedia, some development and troubleshooting guides, tutorials and help stacks.

Producing applications is a simple matter of choosing Build Distribution from the File menu, then picking the platforms you want. This cross-platform ability is far more than lip-service. Tools and full information about developing for each supported platform is provided throughout the documentation and each language keyword is flagged in the Transcript dictionary according to the relevant platforms. Vitally, there's no licence fee imposed on applications built with Revolution, so you're free to make software without incurring distribution fees of any kind.

Construction work

The software comes in three different forms. The Starter Kit Edition is free, but limits the length of individual scripts. It's effectively a fully functional demo, but can be used to create full applications for any computer platform.

The Standard Edition has no script limit, but also has no email support (apart from the main mailing list community). The Professional Edition provides direct email support, printed documentation and free software updates for a year.

Revolution 1.0 runs on Mac OS X in Classic mode, but version 1.1 is due for release by the end of October. This will bring Carbon compatibility and the ability to create OS X-native applications.

The Holy Grail of cross-platform software development, 'write once, deliver anywhere', is actually here, and it's ready for serious commercial work while being easy enough for novice users. Revolution indeed.