revJournal - Features

Help! Part 2: Tips & Example Stacks Online

In the first part of "Help!," I showed you some of the resources available for learning Revolution. In this section, I want to show you where you can find collections of tips and example stacks for download...

Tips:

The best collection of Revolution tips online is at the Sons of Thunder web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com. From the home page, go to Developer Resources, then choose Revolution from the Navigator box on the left. Ken Ray has put together a great resource and it is beautifully organised so you can easily scan to the areas you find interesting.

Another tips collection is at the Altuit RunRev web site: http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/RunRev/. This isn?t quite as easy to navigate as the Sons of Thunder web site but if you are looking for tips, check out the Useful Scripts, Notes and Tutorials sections. Chipp Walters has written a good selection of plugins which are also available at this site, but we'll talk about them another day.

Example stacks:

Another great way to learn is by looking at stacks that other people have written. If you are lucky, the scripts will be well commented so you know what is going on, but even if you can?t decipher someone else's code, it is always good to know that what you want to do is really possible.

If people publish an unprotected stack, as opposed to a built application or a protected stack, then you are free to open up the scripts and poke around. Just remember that if you do end up using a script or method that you have managed to extract from someone else's stack, it is polite to let them know. One more warning: these stacks are not commercial software - you pay nothing and you should expect nothing. It?s your responsibility to check that they work before using them for something critical.

The biggest collection would be at the Revolution web site on the User Contributions page:
http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/developercentral/usercontributions.html

These stacks have been submitted by many different Revolutionaries and cover a wide variety of topics. Unfortunately they are only organised by the date of submission so you have to scroll through the entire list to see if there is something worth checking out.

FourthWorld: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev/

Richard Gaskin has some interesting articles on his web site, but for downloadable stacks, have a look at his series of 4W stacks - each useful on their own as well as showing interesting ways to script Revolution. The stacks are mainly developer tools.

Klaus Major's X-Talk page http://www.major-k.de/revstart.html]. Don't panic if it looks like the page is in German - each of the stacks also has an English description.

Richmond Mathewson is a prolific writer of Revolution hacks: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/files.html. He likes to edit Revolution's built-in stacks to provide an alternative interface. Feel free to try them, but remember to keep backups of any of the stacks that he replaces.

Sweat Technologies? Monte Goulding has produced a series of library stacks on a variety of topics: colors, cursors, XML and so on: http://www.sweattechnologies.com/rev/. Although these are listed as libraries, don't be put off by the terminology. This just means that they are stacks that can easily be incorporated into your own stack files. If you just want to have a look, open them as if they were any other stack.

Finally, while there are undoubtedly sites out there that I have forgotten to mention, I would like to put in a plug for my own collection of stacks at http://www.troz.net/Rev/. There is no particular sequence or organisation to this list, although recent changes are always mentioned near the top. The list grew due to my habit of creating a test stack whenever I am trying to learn a new feature of Revolution. For some of these things, the test stack became sufficiently complex that I thought others might appreciate them.


How to use example stacks:

I consider that there are three different types of downloadable stacks: (1) Libraries; (2) Working utilities & plugins; and (3) Learning tools.

Libraries are stacks that you can add to your own projects, either by copying the complete stack into your stack file, or by telling your stack to use it.

Working utilities and plugins are stacks that you use while working in Revolution. Plugins are normal Revolution stacks but they are stored in a special place so they are accessible through one of the standard Revolution menus.

Learning tools are stacks that demonstrate how to do a particular thing or how to work with a certain set of Revolution commands.

This article is directed mainly towards the learning tools: so you downloaded a stack and now this file is sitting on your desktop. What do you do next?

Firstly, most files you download will have been compressed, so they need to be expanded. The most common forms of compressed files are .zip, .sit or .gz. If you use a Mac, Stuffit Expander will handle any of these file types. On Windows, WinZip will uncompress .zip files, Stuffit Expander for Windows will do .sit files, and Revolution itself can do .gz files. I have a stack on my web site that will decompress .gz files for you: http://www.troz.net/Rev/RevProjects/RevGZ2.rev.zip

Once you have the stack uncompressed, it will probably have the file extension .rev. If it has no extension then add one. If it has the extension .mc, change it to .rev. After that, double-clicking should open it in Revolution, but this isn?t always the case. Sometimes a system will refuse to recognise the stack as a Revolution file, even if you use the Open menu item from inside Revolution. If that happens, paste this script into the message box and press Return:

  answer file "Select a stack:"; go to stack it

By now you should have the stack open in Revolution. The first step is to use it: click all the buttons, type entries where you can, generally make it operate as it was supposed to. Remember that this stack was not released as a commercial program, so it?s error trapping and debugging may not be perfect. If it looks like you are stuck in a loop, press Control/Command-period to get out.

Now go and have a look in the scripts. Perhaps you can work out why most of the stack does what it does, but if in doubt, plunge in and rummage around. Now make changes! Really! If you kept the original download, you can always decompress a fresh copy if disaster strikes, but you'll learn the most by making your own edits and seeing what they do. If a particular script baffles you, turn on Script Debug Mode in the Development menu, then set a breakpoint by clicking beside a script line in the script Editor. When that line of script is about to be executed, the script will pause and wait for you. You can have a look at the Variable Watcher and step through the script to see which sections do what.

Finally:

My final hint for today is nothing to do with any downloadable stacks of collections of tips but is probably the most valuable resource available to Revolution developers: the use-revolution mailing list. The list has a large number of members who cover a great many areas, so if you get stuck, ASK! So long as you are polite, my experience is that people are very keen to assist.

You can subscribe to the list here: http://www.runrev.com/Revolution1/developercentral/maillists.html

The archives are available here: http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/

To search the lists, go to the Mindlube Software site: http://mindlube.com/cgi-bin/search-use-rev.cgi

Until next time.
Sarah