Revolution is descended in spirit from Hypercard (HC). When Apple's support for HC withered, Scott Raney developed Metacard (MC), a near clone. Metacard was then bought by Revolution (RR), based in Scotland. Metacard was two quite distinct things: an engine, and an IDE. When Metacard was sold, the MC IDE became public domain. It still exists, is volunteer maintained, and it can be used with the latest RR engine. Some on the RR user mailing list prefer the much simpler MC IDE to the RR IDE, at least for initial project development. Other IDEs are possible, and there is a third party (non-free) IDE called Galaxy.
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Member since:2007-01-09
I think that it is reasonably priced when compared with the commercial competition (Omnis, RealBasic, Wirefusion). When Revolution was marketed as MetaCard some years ago, I mistakenly dismissed it as it seemed like it was a toy - and it was about $1000. Revolution is much more reasonably priced, and comes in a variety of formats with different pricing (the cheapest format being about $50).
If there was an open source tool that offered the ease of Revolution and the cross-platform deployment, I might well be using that. But there isn't. The persistence metaphor behind it (cards and stacks) is very simple, the language is very easy to read, and the message-passing paradigm is really very powerful.
The documentation does need work - it was historically much better a year or so ago, but it was drastically changed because of (IMO unjustifiable) user complaints. But there is nothing stopping new users from downloading earlier versions and taking the documentation from that whilst Runtime Revolution are working on the current docs.
Member since:2005-10-12
For a hobby, for quite a lot of people, yes it may be too expensive in the full version, and they should then probably try either the Media version or PythonCard, which will be harder work in some ways but is also quite interesting.
But for a professional, its just part of the tools of the trade, and its quite competitively priced compared to similar things on the market.
Revolution also do the usual educational discounts.
Member since:
2006-12-21
It is just too expensive IMO.