I think Greg covered the main points well. But if you need cross-platform it is an incredible development tool and if you haven’t looked at it in a few years then I would take another look. Runtime Revolution (the company that makes Revolution) has really stepped it up these last two years and have been delivering a nice balance of enhancements related to UI and those that programmers need to be productive. Version 3.5 was just released and the focus was on the ability to create reusable controls through “behaviors” (parent scripts that any object can inherit from) and version 3 added multi-dimensional arrays which has been an incredible boon to our productivity. I will just reiterate what Greg said – there are tradeoffs but we are very happy with the direction that Revolution is headed right now.

With the new behaviors feature in 3.5 it will be interesting to see if more reusable widgets are released by the Revolution community. If that starts to happen then I imagine you will have more prefab controls that look/act a lot like their OS X counterparts.

The short answer to your question is “almost, but not quite.” In my opinion Revolution comes closest out of the tools that you described but there are still tradeoffs. I think that ScreenSteps right now comes just about as close to a native Mac app as you can with Revolution. If you look at it closely you will notice that there are still things that are not “Mac like” such as text shortcuts, graphics, etc.

It is definitely a tradeoff. But in our case, many of our customers need to be able to use ScreenSteps on Windows as well. So we have decided that the productivity boost we get with Revolution is worth the tradeoff we have to make in not being able to take advantage of all of Cocoa’s beauty. There is no way that we could develop the type of cross-platform tool that we have without it. Depending on the software you are building that tradeoff may or may not be worth it.

I must say this though, Revolution is getting better and better all of the time. We are constantly pushing to get more of those “Mac features” in there, or at least the ability to add them in ourselves. It isn’t there yet but we are confident enough with the progress that Revolution is making that we are sticking with it.

I looked at Revolution a few years ago, but it had some deal-killing shortcomings, but I’m constantly in search of that ‘holy grail’ of a cross-platform language that doesn’t compromise on capabilities. In other words, I want to be able to build ANYTHING on OS X that I could do with Objective-C/Cocoa, but still have the benefit of being able to sell to Win/Lin users and still have a passable UI on those secondary platforms. But if I have to compromise on OS X (as I would with REALbasic, although it’s still better than all the Java apps I’ve seen by a long shot) then I’m not going to be very excited about it.

I realize this is asking for a lot from a tool. Java makes OS X an afterthought and most Java-based apps act like Aqua buttons is all it takes to make an OS X UI. REALbasic is still stuck in the old days of Carbon. WxWidgets require X11 (as far as I remember). HotCocoa looks awesome, but is not for cross-platform development. Will Revolution meet my desires/expectations/needs?

Like David the previous poster I’m just starting to learn Rev, so your site’s info is very helpful.

Thanks,

Mark

One of the points I mention in this article is the fact that you can design in real time with Revolution. Not having to compile your application each time you want to see if some code works saves you a lot of time when you are trying to experiment with code.

The Runtime Revolution website has a section of their website which may prove useful to you. A number of tutorials and developer resources are available there: http://runrev.com/developers/getting-started/