In my 2008 post “Hypercard Lives!” (link here), I expressed my admiration for Hypercard. In the post I discussed Runtime Revolution, a cross platform development tool that appears to have decended from Hypercard and has far exceeded Hypercard’s capabilities.
At the time of the original post, Runtime Revolution 2.9 was available for $50 for the less capable Media edition or $399 for the Studio edition.
Runtime Revolution Studio in revision 3.5 dropped to $250, with the Media edition still at $50 (if I remember correctly).
The purpose of this short post is to let readers know that Runtime Revolution 4.0 has been available for some time now… but I just realized that the Media Edition price has dropped. The Media edition is now FREE!
As in previous versions of Runtime Revolution, the Media edition has a number of limitations, some of which are:
- Will not compile to a standalone executable
Stacks (programs) require the Runtime Revolution Player (either standalone on web based) to execute.
- Does not support databases
I would say that neither of these should be a problem for beginning programmers. A pretty cool demo of creating a game like app is here. Note that this demo requires you to have installed the revWeb plugin (in the downloads menu on the RunRev.com site).
One more note about Runtime Revolution; an alpha version of their new product revMobile is shipping. This will allow users to create apps for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, Windows Mobile, and Maemo (smartphone operating system based on Linux). It’s pretty expensive - $799 if you buy now in the alpha stage or $999 when complete. If you’re interested at all, check out the video of an iPhone app being created here.
Wow! It’s been almost exactly a year 2 years since I posted on my adventures with Scratch on Linux (see post here).
Well, the Scratch team at MIT has made the use of Scratch 1.4 (the latest version) on Ubuntu Linux (versions 9.04 and 9.10) much less of an adventure. I’ve successfully followed the installation procedure on 5 Ubuntu 9.04 computers. I have not done extensive testing on Ubuntu, but everything I’ve tried works fine.
Installer notes:
- The instructions for installing Scratch on Ubuntu are posted here.
- I did NOT use the link https://launchpad.net/+help/soyuz/ppa-sources-list.html (this is a link in the intructions).
- Open the Software Sources panel via System -> Administration -> Software Sources to access the “3rd party software sources” list.
- Although instructed to do so by the instructions, I was not able to “paste” the line
sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 4EA7974E
into the console. I had to type the line in.
- When you go to the System -> Administration -> Symantec list to find Scratch to select it for install, you’ll find a formidable list to look through. If you look through there and really can’t find Scratch or scratch (I’m sure that happened to me a couple of times), reboot the computer and then look through the list again. Either Scratch miraculously showed up or resting for a couple of minutes while the computer rebooted improved my search capability.
Comparing Scratch on Ubuntu to my original post:
- An installer for Scratch 1.4 is available for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10. This alleviates the need to install Squeak and then the WinScratch.zip file… just follow the instructions!
- A launch icon is automatically added to the Applications menu under Programming. No need to open the terminal to start the program.
- Presentation mode works.
- Sound works (although I didn’t explicitly try the midi, so I’m not sure about that).
- The Scratch website works fine with Java installed.
Other notes:
- Edubuntu is no longer published with Ubuntu as part of the same image. First install the standard Ubuntu package, the install the Edubuntu add-on. Link to Ubuntu is here. Link to Edubuntu is here.
Have a great week!