Man i am feeling old... I created Apples first educational CD-ROM
(Earth Explorer - a multimedia environmental encyclopedia for jr high
kids) when they decided to get into the CD-ROM business in the early
90s using hypercard. they were amazed that a sophisticated multimedia
product could be developed with hypercard. i had a meeting with
higher ups at Apple to assure them that it was possible... their
testing dept. finally confirmed that it worked and was relatively bug
free! It struck me funny i had to sell the idea to Apple. in contrast
the PC version (done in VB) took about 4x the person-hours to
complete the software and that was with the content being squeaky
clean (the mac version was 6 months ahead and did all the content
testing) and content being exported to them exactly how they wanted
it (i got it in all sorts of various forms that i used HC to convert
to the final formats i needed--one of HC, strongest points). They had
about 8 fat bug binders, i had about 2 and that included all the
content bugs! The other guys were pro programmers with degrees and
much better programmers than me (i was a molecular biologist and self
taught programmer).
when i was designing the product i had mocked it up in hc and the
company developing it was planning on programming it in C, but then
when the mock up was doing 90% of what needed to be done I proposed
me just doing it in HC. Boy did that get a laugh from the programming
dept at first. but then they shut up when they realized that yes the
prototype did just about everything that it needed to be done just
fine (what was left was minor stuff that we took care of with a
couple of custom externals) and the budget and timeline was a
fraction of doing it all in C.
oh and it will still run today, even under classic. funny thing is
cdroms are now getting very popular back in schools (they are finding
the internet is not the solution to all educational content delivery
-- realities of working in a school) and the product may be dusted
off, content updated and new software done with revolution!
Just shows you what was possible with that quirky little piece of
software. I dont think Apple fully realized how much HC was a part of
the success of Apple in general. Apple survived on the fringes by the
undying passion of users that things like HC kept going. Without them
they would have never gotten a big enough market share to hold on or
enough reasons why their hardware was at a premium price w/o the
evangelists selling it so hard and passionately.
I think the lesson here is that there are options to make great stuff
out of older things like stuff created in dreamcard. yes the simple,
cheap gui building system like HC wont be there, but the work done in
it can be moved forward and useful. No system lasts for ever, but
moving stuff forward is possible and can really pull some rabbits out
of the hat...
cheers,
jeff reynolds
On Mar 4, 2006, at 1:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
Close. 19 years ago. I remember it came in the box with the new SE20
for A&M studios. I was attempting to build an app with Z-Basic at the
time, and not getting anywhere...then discovering this thing......
what's this... some kind of add-in hardware card? ha ha
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