Re: Metacard Vs. ToolBook
Hiho, Barry! At 9:24 Uhr -0600 26.10.1999, Barry Boepple wrote: I am interested in learning more about Metacard's Internet capabilities. -Does your scripting language get converted to Java or some other native language that will run in current browsers? No. MetaCard is cross plattform itself. What advantage would Java give you but satisfy the hype! -Is the Metacard company responsive to your concerns and requests? Very, very, very much!!! -How stable is Metacard in the development mode? MetaCard develops very quickly and about four major new versions are released a year with about 3 bugfix releases in between. But there are hardly any cases where old stacks don't run in a new version and there is a long beta test phase, so you can adopt early. -Does it have a large overhead for CD distribution? I don't know of any. -Is converting from PC to Mac, UNIX etc...reliable and easy? There are no problems you can accuse MetaCard of. You can do some plattform specific stuff, but for normal applications there are no problems. Hope these are the two cents you have asked for ;-) Rüdiger | Ruediger zu Dohna GINIT GmbH 0721-96681-63[EMAIL PROTECTED] | | PGP-Fingerprint: F1 BF 9D 95 57 26 48 42 FE F8 E8 02 41 1A EE 3E |
re: Metacard Vs. ToolBook
Hi Barry, As a long-time (6+ years) user of Toolbook who is now using MetaCard, I thought that I would give you some idea about what to expect from MetaCard. BTW, I have been using MetaCard for about 7 months and would never go back to Toolbook. First, a few things that caused me some initial headaches... The most obvious thing you will notice is that the IDE for MetaCard is much less mature than Toolbook's. To be honest, it took me a couple of weeks before I felt comfortable with how things worked. I'm used to it now, and have found some things about how it works that I prefer over Toolbook, but the transition was difficult. While Asymetrix has focused on creating new, more powerful dialogs and wizards in their IDE, MetaCard folks have focused more on building the capabilities of the language itself. When was the last time that Asymetrix came out with any kind of extended capabilities for OpenScript? I think it was TB4 (several years ago). The second major problem for me was the way the Debugger in MC works. It's much different than Toolbook, and less robust. Finally, the help system in MetaCard can't hold a candle to Toolbook's. Give it to Asymetrix folks, they really did a great job on their help file. The MetaCard help is in a different format and isn't comprehensive. That's it for my gripes. In almost every other way, MetaCard is superior to Toolbook. The scripting language (MetaTalk) in MC is very similar to OpenScript, you will not have much trouble making the conversion. MetaTalk, however, is much more powerful than OpenScript. In some cases, I've found that just a couple of MetaTalk lines of code suffice to do what Toolbook would need 8-10 to do. Plus there are all kinds of functions that Toolbook never thought about providing. For example, MetaCard has a screenLoc() function that returns (in pixels! not TB page units - which I hate!) the point that defines the center of the screen. How many lines of OpenScript code would it take to do that one? And then there's screenDepth(), screenRect(), platform(), machine(), environment(), lookAndFeel()...and that's just the beginning. For delivery, MetaCard apps can be compiled into a singe EXE file that includes the MetaCard Engine, where with Toolbook you have to distribute the 18+ separate files that make up Toolbook's distributable runtime engine. Making a cross-platform app is done by essentially compiling with the machine-specific engine. We develop on Windows, then build a Mac version on our Mac. We learned that there are some differences in how the different engines work, but nothing serious that we couldn't work around. We've never tried to create an app that runs on UNIX. Lastly, MetaCard is much snappier than Toolbook. My MetaCard apps load 5-10 times faster than the *same* Toolbook app. Files are smaller, performance is much better. Like I said, we have been very pleased since we switched to MC as our main development environment and would recommend all Toolbook developers take a serious look at MetaCard. Hope this perspective is useful. --Leston Original Message To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Barry Boepple ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Subject:Metacard Vs. ToolBook Greetings, Currently I use ToolBook 6.5 for CBT development. There is a general sense of discontent among many ToolBook users related to it's web capabilities and the direction Asymetrix (Click2Learn) is taking. Our list serve has a lot of activity on it and recently a thread about Metacard appeared. I think there are a few other ToolBookers monitoring your list now to see what all of you have to say about Metacard. I am interested in learning more about Metacard's Internet capabilities. What kind of real world experience all of you are having with it? There is so much hype these days regarding many products capabilities, but often in a real world setting, things are not as peachy as the hype would have it be. Would any of you be willing to elaborate on web based projects as far as the pros and cons of Metacard for such projects? I am interested in knowing such things as: -Does your scripting language get converted to Java or some other native language that will run in current browsers? -Is the Metacard company responsive to your concerns and requests? -How stable is Metacard in the development mode? -Does it have a large overhead for CD distribution? -Is converting from PC to Mac, UNIX etc...reliable and easy? I hope this is not an inappropriate request, but who better to ask than the people actually using the product in the field. Thanks Barry Boepple SUMMETRIC Interactive Software, Inc. http://www.summetric.com -- Leston Drake LetterPress Software, Inc. http://www.lpsoftware.com --
Re: Metacard Vs. ToolBook
-Does your scripting language get converted to Java or some other native language that will run in current browsers? Not directly in a browser window, but with built-in HTTP support (and soon, raw TCP) one can build Internet connectivity directly in your app, without the encumbrance of being confined to the browser window (for CBTs, the browser is often too flexible and hampers the guiding of the learner). -Is the Metacard company responsive to your concerns and requests? ToolBook: Took three days just to document TB's unnecssarily complicated boot sequence , and ultimately I wrote this documentation myself from notes with Asym TS folks; it seems they don't document "the little things". :) MetaCard: I can't recall any question that too longer than 24 hours to get an answer, often much quicker (Scott Raney is pretty amazing about email turnaround). -How stable is Metacard in the development mode? There seem to be more instances in which script errors can cause a crash than with some other interpreted tools, but there haven't been that many and they seem fewer with each build. Today this stability seems roughly on par with my experience with ToolBook (and virtually all other Windows apps; you might find it even more stable developing on UNIX). -Does it have a large overhead for CD distribution? Tiny, and simple: A single 2 MB exe is embedded into your stack file. Contrast this with ToolBook, which requires a complicated install that spews things all over the user's hard drive and weighs in many times larger. -Is converting from PC to Mac, UNIX etc...reliable and easy? UNIX is a tad tricker given that most UNIX users have a higher resolution than Mac or Windows folks. But aside from this sizing issue (a function of the OSes rather than MC itself), once you learn a couple things like working with menuGroups it's a snap. - Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com US: 800-288-5825 Int'l: 323-225-3717Fax: 323-225-0716
Re: Metacard Vs. ToolBook
From: "Barry Boepple" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Greetings, Currently I use ToolBook 6.5 for CBT development. There is a general sense of discontent among many ToolBook users related to it's web capabilities and the direction Asymetrix (Click2Learn) is taking. Our list serve has a lot of activity on it and recently a thread about Metacard appeared. I think there are a few other ToolBookers monitoring your list now to see what all of you have to say about Metacard. I, too, use ToolBook -- and because I have to, not because I want to. Toolbook is clumsy in its handling of graphics. I am interested in learning more about Metacard's Internet capabilities. What kind of real world experience all of you are having with it? There is so much hype these days regarding many products capabilities, but often in a real world setting, things are not as peachy as the hype would have it be. I deal with large numbers of graphics. When you link to a graphic, like a gif or jpg file in Toolbook, Toolbook converts the graphic to a bitmap and physically stores the bitmap in the book. This has the effect of severely inflating file sizes. I have lost work several times due to file corruption. MetaCard sees a link as a link. There is no physical storage of the graphic in the stack unless you "import" the graphic. Importing is largely unnecessary. While I do not know of a MetaCard Stack that serves to output HTML, no doubt one could be written fairly easily. Would any of you be willing to elaborate on web based projects as far as the pros and cons of Metacard for such projects? I am interested in knowing such things as: -Does your scripting language get converted to Java or some other native language that will run in current browsers? I doubt this, although some intrepid individual might try making a JavaScript/xTalk converter. But Java runs really slow, and the Java output that Toolbook provides is, well, junk. It hogs processor time. -Is the Metacard company responsive to your concerns and requests? Without a doubt, MetaCard and its associated individuals are the most responsive people I have ever met. They are really *good*. -How stable is Metacard in the development mode? VERY!!! (yes, I *am* shouting! I couldn't ask for better!) -Does it have a large overhead for CD distribution? -Is converting from PC to Mac, UNIX etc...reliable and easy? I work in both environments. Conversion is very easy -- usually no more than just making sure your fonts work right. I hope this is not an inappropriate request, but who better to ask than the people actually using the product in the field. Thanks Barry Boepple SUMMETRIC Interactive Software, Inc. http://www.summetric.com Cheers! Raymond E. Griffith
