As Metacard is coming of age and considerably maturing at the same time
it would probably be a good idea to expand the Metacard community (which
could be profitable both for the producer and consumers).
Of the possible approaches I very much like the proposal to offer
special prices - maybe only for older versions - to Hypercard and
Supercard users, as is was suggested by Simon Lord and Monte Goulding.
Another possibility is to go more public in the shareware/freeware area
with the Starter Kit, where Metacard is "virtually" not present (pun
intended). Metacard - for instance - is nearly unknown in Germany, I can
remember only one instance when Metacard was mentioned in a computer
magazine; this was in "Screen" (www.screen-online.de) about two years
ago - and they put the Starter Kit on their cd.
I had made the proposal to add the Starter Kit to the list of authoring
tools of the "www.download.com"-site some time ago, but Kevin had some
reservations about this. The download people only accept software that
is authorized to appear there by the producer. I think Kevin's
reservations were about still to improve some aspects of Metacard before
going public in this way.
One general recommendation I would make to improve such aspects of
Metacard would be to indeed improve some parts of the
documentation/helpfiles of Metacard about how to use MetaTalk. In a
number of cases - I do not specify a percentage here - you still have to
puzzle together how to proceed with MetaTalk, because sometimes there
are only hints and incomplete practical examples (which may after all
have the positive function to remind an initiated Metacard user of some
forgotten information). I have experienced this myself in the course of
becoming acquainted with Metacard - despite migrating to Metacard mainly
from three other x-talk languages (Hypercard, HyperPad, and Toolbook) -
and I see the difficulties of students each year when we introduce them
to use the Starter Kit in our multimedia workshops.-
There were a lot of messages recently on the list discussing "Hypercard
and the future of Metacard" etc. I would like to mention in this context
an extinct x-talk language, namely "HyperPad", that was part of my
"socialisation" as a multimedia addict.
With x-talk languages I started with Hypercard and HyperPad, moved to
Toolbook because of Windows, looked at Omo, worked with Supercard and
Spinnaker's "Plus", and finally arrived at MetaCard.
HyperPad appeared in 1989 and was - as far as I know - the first
Hypercard clone for the DOS-world. It was in a number of aspects a very
much improved clone of Hypercard. The big problem was that it was a pure
DOS program and that Brightbill&Roberts unfortunately never succeeded to
produce a Windows version. HyperPad was dead by 1995.
The first thing worth mentioning about HyperPad was its wonderful
documentation, two volumes of nearly 400 pages each (a "User Guide" and
the "PadTalk Reference") that left almost no questions open, partly
because for each instance of the PadTalk language there were clear
practical examples how to use the language in a given context. In the
six years that HyperPad was supported by Brightbill&Roberts I approached
them about three times about issues I had difficulties with.
HyperPad had a clear, organized user interface, could be easily
connected to databases, and could be extended with "extensions" (simlar
to xcmds and dlls) - which again was elaborated in the documentation.
PadTalk contained a standard-deviation function - back in 1989 - a
feature Scott included this month in Metacard 2.4. Two other
"progressive" examples of the PadTalk language:
- There was a "trim" function, very useful for creating educational
software, that deleted leading and trailing spaces of user input.
- "lines" and "items" had features different from other x-talk
languages, including Metacard, e.g. the scriptline
put "something" after last line of...
would create a new line without having to add "CR&", putting something
before or after an item would likewise create a new item without having
to add ","&. This made scripting in many instances easier and
comfortable. Of course, you could always put something on the same line
by then adding " put something after last word (last item, last char) of
line x", but the number of occasions where you have to create a new line
or item are surely much more frequent than adding something on the same
line.
So far part of a nostalgic look back at HyperPad.--
To come back to the subject of this message: I support those that
suggest approaches to broaden the basis of Metacard. The 10th
anniversary of Metacard (is that correct?) would be one more reason for
taking steps in that direction.
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/
Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
