Two weeks ago we hosted a webinar discussing the new Data Grid control available in Revolution 3.5. Revolution is the cross-platform development environment that we write all of our desktop software in and ScreenSteps uses the Data Grid control extensively. In the webinar we show how we integrated the Data Grid into ScreenSteps 2.5 and share some tips and tricks that will prove useful to anyone working with Data Grids.

The webinar is about 70 minutes long with a little over half of the time spent presenting and the reset spent answering questions from attendees. To watch the recording just visit the archive page.

A few weeks ago Kevin Miller, Bill Marriott (both of Runtime Revolution) and I put on a webinar that introduced the new Data Grid in Revolution 3.5. The data grid was originally developed for ScreenSteps so that we could provide our customers with a much more responsive UI when working with large libraries and lessons. We were thrilled when Revolution decided to integrate it into their core product.

Given the extremely positive response by attendees, Greg and I thought people might be interested in seeing how ScreenSteps 2.5 uses data grids throughout the application. So we’ve added a new webinar to our webinars page entitled Using Data Grids in Revolution 3.5. In the webinar we will show you:

• The various UI elements created using the data grid.
• The techniques used to create some of the visuals.
• The techniques used to hook the data grids up to data from SQLite, stacks, folder contents and the web.

We also plan on providing ample time to answer questions people might have. So join us on Thursday April 30th if you want to improve your data grid chops.

Sign up for webinar

Round here we develop all of our desktop applications using Revolution. I recently attended the RunRevLive 08 conference in Las Vegas where one of the speakers was Robert Cailliau, the co-developer of the web. Robert spoke on “Programming systems and the birth of the Web”. Following a very interesting presentation on how the web came about he discussed some characteristics he thought a good programming language should have:

• You should not need the reference manual lying open next to you.
• A good assignment operator.
• The less “swear” characters the better. These are characters from the top of the keyboard and are like the top shelf at a newsstand – dirty.
• You should not need lots of comments.

His point was that you spend most of your time reading your code, not writing it. Therefore the language should be easy to read and understand. Since Revolution uses an english-like syntax it fulfills all of Robert’s criteria.

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Over the last few weeks we have been shifting the primary focus of ScreenSteps Live to manuals. In doing so we have been looking at ways to easily integrate the manuals you create into a variety of different applications.

One feature we recently added was the ability to fetch a list of manual lessons that has been filtered by tags. For example, if I have a manual for my web application I can tag all of the lessons that discuss managing users with “user management”. I could then add some javascript (supplied by ScreenSteps Live) to my user management screens that displays all lessons from my manual tagged with “user management”. As I continue to add lessons and make updates based on user feedback those lessons pertaining to “user management” would automatically show up in my web application.

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