About the Course

Note: This course was written in 2009. The course is now being made available for free as the content is old. There is still relevant information in it for a developer so I’m still making the materials available for consumption.

Revolution is an incredible cross-platform development tool for quickly creating programs that run on Mac, Windows and Linux. But creating a professional, polished application that is ready for release still requires a great deal of know-how and expertise.

Blue Mango Learning Systems, author of the free and open-source GLX Application Framework, is pleased to announce a new online course targeted at application developers: Professional Application Development With Revolution.

Course Overview

This course teaches you about application development techniques in Revolution. We start with how to organize your development environment and go through releasing installers and updaters. The course uses the open-source GLX Application Framework as a foundation to illustrate various principles.

The GLX Application Framework provides the underlying infrastructure you need for creating professional-grade applications on Mac and Windows. This allows you to focus on making your application unique and valuable instead of wasting time setting up mundane features such as undo support. Using the framework saves you time and makes you more productive. This is the same framework that we use in our application ScreenSteps.

This course covers how to:

Organize your application within the GLX Application Framework
Utilize framework features, such as the preferences API, to remove unneeded headache from the development process
Deal with cross-platform issues
Establish a repeatable process for updating and distributing your application

The course is presented by Trevor DeVore of Blue Mango Learning Systems. Trevor is the programmer behind ScreenSteps.

Course Topics

Organizing for Success:	Learn how to harness all of the benefits that Revolution offers when developing cross-platform application by setting up your development environment correctly. Focus will be on organizing your application development environment, understanding key concepts of the GLX Application Framework, maintaining a single code base when releasing to multiple target groups and platforms, organizing code, objects and internal media…
Building Your App Part I:	Creating the application specific portions of your application foundation. Introduction to managing preferences, distinguishing different types of controls based on name, fonts and control dimensions, referencing media external to your application, undo manager…
Building Your App Part II:	Using broadcasting to notify objects when properties change, discussion about behaviors, opening files associated with your application, building robust internet integration into your application…
Deploying and Distributing:	Moving from staging to distribution, fast, worry-free packaging and distribution, enabling users to automatically update their applications with no fuss…