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Implementing the example application went smoothly in Revolution, other than a few stability glitches typical of 1.0 versions. (Saving the work, and quitting and restarting the development environment, was adequate to address these.) Graphics, text, and controls all came together nicely. The animation of the settings panel was completed with the following simple code:

if the state of me is "open" then
  set the state of me to "closed"
  move me to the closedLoc of me in .5 seconds
else
  set the state of me to "open"
  move me to the openLoc of me in .5 seconds
end if

The code is in the settings panel, which means that “me” refers to the settings panel itself. State, closedLoc, and openLoc are custom properties used on the fly — no special setup was necessary, where in REALbasic custom properties are defined in a custom dialog, one at a time. The “move” command animates the opening and closing of the settings panel; REALbasic has no similar animation capability, so in the REALbasic version, the Settings panel is just another tab on the Tab Panel.

The actual processing of files, including setup, file processing, display, log file creation, and the ability to stop and resume the process, took just over 80 lines of similarly English-like Transcript code, a two-to-one advantage over REALbasic.

Major factors that contributed to the success of the project included:

• Ease of application layout
• Use of built-in regular expression capabilities
• Clean organization of code allowing an excellent overview of the project
• The incremental development environment’s ability to edit code literally as the project was running during the debugging process

Correcting minor cross-platform font and layout differences was simple. There were no code issues with the Windows version of the application. Revolution handles file paths and line delimiters identically across all platforms, performing translations automatically as necessary.

All development was completed on the Macintosh. Ironically, with no Windows code issues, there was no need to debug in the Windows version of Revolution, while the Windows-related issues in the REALbasic example application would have been much easier to solve if the REALbasic development environment ran on Windows.

Despite the wide array of platforms to deploy to, creating applications for all of them was a simple matter of checking off which ones to build for. Any necessary components not on the local computer were automatically downloaded, a nice touch.