jteh@mulga.UUCP (08/17/87)
Preview of Multi-Finder and Hyper-Card -------------------------------------- The new Apple Multi-Finder and Bill Atkinson's Hyper-Card was demonstrated today (17/8/87) at the University of Melbourne to a small audience. Multi-Finder is a new Apple Finder that allows you to open multiple applications simultaneously. At the moment, it doesn't allow you to perform true multi-tasking on the Macintosh but it is hoped that in the near future, multi-tasking will be achieved on the Macintosh. At the moment, to launch Multi-Finder, it has to be selected as the start-up application via the menu option. Once Multi-Finder has been launched, it allows the user to open multiple documents while having the Multi-Finder desktop still in the background. This is similiar to the Amiga and Atari ST's multi-tasking interface. With many applications open at the same time, you can switch between applications easily by either clicking in the drag-bar of the window belonging to the application you want to reactivate or you can select the application whose name which has been installed at the bottom of the apple menu. Currently, Multi-Finder only supports print spooling as a background task. The recommended configuration for Multi-FInder is 2mB as each opened application consumes RAM. The memory usage of each application can be viewed by selecting the "About Finder ..." from the apple menu. This displays bar graphs of the memory usage and available memory. For the past two years, Bill Atkinson has been working on Hyper-Card after completing MacPaint. Hyper-Card is a very radical approach to idea storage and processing. Hyper-Card is based on the concept of hyper-text and allows you to link ideas together at the same time, mixing text with graphics. Hyper-Card is based on the concept of cards where each card can consist of text or graphics. On each card, buttons can be installed. These buttons allows links to be made to other cards so that if a button is clicked, the card that it is linked to is displayed. For example, if you click on the hat of a picture of a man wearing a hat, another card with the picture of a hat will be displayed. Hyper-Card also supports its own programming language so that Hyper-Card style applications can be written. One example that was demonstrated consisted of an interactive world atlas. If the region of Europe on the world map was clicked, the map of Europe was displayed. If France was selected, the map of France with the major cities was displayed. At this low level, other options can be "called-up", for example, you can get the average weather for that region, exchange rates, hotels, stored addresses in that country, airlines and so forth including customs. At a recent meeting of Apple Consortium members and dealers in the US from the major universities, Bill Atkinson demonstrated Hyper-Card. It is reported that when he finished, the audience gave him a standing ovation - the first ever given to a programmer. Another new innovation that was revealed in Hyper-Card was the concept of "tear-off" menus. This allows the user to select a menu which consisted of a MacPaint-like pallete of paint tools and move it off the menu bar onto the desktop. This has to be seen to be believed. Hyper-Card also remembers the last 100 cards that were displayed and the user is able to call up a miniature display of the contents of the 100 cards. This alone is quite a feat as Bill Atkinson had to devise a new algorithm to do this as shrinking the contents of the card alone would not have sufficed as this would have resulted in just black rectangles but in Hyper-Card, the miniaturised displays can be clearly recognised. Currently, Hyper-Card doesn't support colour and its dimensions are limited to 342x512 pixels to conform to the standard Macintosh screen. This allows Hyper-Card to be compatible with the Mac Plus, Mac SE and the Mac II. Hyper-Card can run on Apple-Share but should only be done if all the accessible cards are read-only. This is because Hyper-Card saves everything whenever a card is modified. Another reason for the limitations were because many corners had to be cut to keep it fast. Also, each such card takes up only 1.5K of memory and it can have as much detail as an average 16K MacPaint file. As a result, you can have over 300 cards on a standard 800k disk. Hyper-Card is fast, even on an SE. Apple is committed to making Hyper-Card the media in which all their new tutorials and helps will be released. Hyper-Card and Multi-Finder will be released in Australia in October. A/UX ---- Apple UNIX was also demonstrated. It conforms to the System V validation suite and includes many 4.2bsd improvements. The recommended configuration is 4mB of RAM, 68551 PMU chip and an 80mB hard disk. At the moment, the recommended number of users that can be on at any one time is 3. It supports multi-tasking and allows you to develop Macintosh applications in a UNIX enviroment and vice-versa. You can also start Macintosh applications from within A/UX but will not allow you to go back into A/UX without rebooting. This can be remedied by modifying the application to support A/UX but this will cause the application to not be compatible with non-A/UX macintoshes. A/UX will be released in Australia in early 1988 though the official release date in the US is sometime in October. A new ImageWriter PS(?) was announced which will have 261dpi quality. This is almost the same quality of a LaserWriter Plus. Its speed at quality mode is said to be 120 characters per second as is guessed that it will sell at around A$2200 (Uni Consortium price), maybe more - the author cannot remember the exact price. J.T. Teh jteh@mulga.oz.australia > Be free to repost this message anywhere as long as it is posted in full > with the author's name - J.T.
ali@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Ali Ozer) (08/19/87)
In article <2165@mulga.oz> jteh@mulga.oz (J.T. Teh) writes: >... the Amiga and Atari ST's multi-tasking interface. One correction: The ST doesn't have a multi-tasking interface. Thanks for an informative review! Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu
dwb@apple.UUCP (David W. Berry) (08/20/87)
In article <2165@mulga.oz> jteh@mulga.oz (J.T. Teh) writes: >Preview of Multi-Finder and Hyper-Card >At the moment, to launch Multi-Finder, it has to be selected as the >start-up application via the menu option. Once Multi-Finder has been Or you can command-option double click on it from the finder. If you change it's type to APPL it runs like any other application. >Currently, Multi-Finder only supports print spooling as a background >task. The recommended configuration for Multi-FInder is 2mB as each If you mean that print spooling is the only supported backrgound task, you are in correct. Multi-Finder supports any background task. It is (unfortunately) the responsibility of the task to make sure it is suitable to being run as a background task. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future. Speaking of A/UX says: >recommended number of users that can be on at any one time is 3. It >supports multi-tasking and allows you to develop Macintosh applications >in a UNIX enviroment and vice-versa. You can also start Macintosh >applications from within A/UX but will not allow you to go back into >A/UX without rebooting. This can be remedied by modifying the application Strange, it seems to go back to A/UX just fine. You just quit the application. For what it's worth, A/UX never really quit running, it's background processes and other scheduling executes as normal. The only change is the mac program running as a UNIX process on the console. > >A new ImageWriter PS(?) was announced which will have 261dpi quality. Actually, it's the "BusinessWriter" >J.T. Teh >jteh@mulga.oz.australia >> Be free to repost this message anywhere as long as it is posted in full >> with the author's name - J.T. Sorry, but that would have more than doubled the size of this response. -- David W. Berry dwb@well.uucp dwb@Delphi dwb@apple.com 293-0752@408.MaBell
bc@apple.UUCP (bill coderre) (08/20/87)
The reason Hypercard is limited on Appleshare is that any modification to the Stack (Hypercard data file) forces Appleshare into a restriction on how many people can open the file. I don't have the technical details on the problem, but Hypercard is currently conceived as a single-user environment. The team is aware of that limitation. Hypercard has a wonderful file system underneath it, which I can't begin to describe (sorry), but suffice it to say that damn near everything is optimal. Not everything is rewritten every time. Here at Apple, on a Mac II, Bill had HC flip through a clip-art stack at about 4 or 5 cards per second. They were being uncompressed as they came off the disk. No memory preload, no prior uncompression. Real Users can expect that level of performance. Data compression is phenomenal. HC is a performance wonder. And yes, Bill did receive a standing "O" here. For five whole minutes. But Bill insists that we stress that there was a whole team developing it, that it is not his project alone. Just pull down the "About..." to see all the people that worked on it. Anyway, enough soapbox. Try it, you'll LOVE it,..................bc
tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (08/26/87)
In article <1509@apple.UUCP> bc@apple.UUCP (bill coderre) writes: >And yes, Bill did receive a standing "O" here. For five whole >minutes. But Bill insists that we stress that there was a whole team >developing it, that it is not his project alone. Just pull down the >"About..." to see all the people that worked on it. This is not just Apple hype, folks. HyperCard is the big fun! Too damn much fun for a working programmer! If Apple doesn't get anything else done for the rest of the year, it will be because everyone is playing with HyperCard.... This is not to say that it's perfect. Any program this big also generates a large list of complaints and wishes. But it's astonishingly good, and it seems likely that it can go on getting better, unlike Atkinson's first program. All hats should be off to the development team. >Here at Apple, on a Mac II, Bill had HC flip through a clip-art stack >at about 4 or 5 cards per second. They were being uncompressed as >they came off the disk. No memory preload, no prior uncompression. >Real Users can expect that level of performance. Data compression is >phenomenal. HC is a performance wonder. Well, they won't get quite that performance out of a non-68020 machine with no extra memory past the first meg for caching. But it still seems to be very fast on an SE. (I use a Paris - no, not a Mac II - myself.) Also, printing is very slow. >Anyway, enough soapbox. Try it, you'll LOVE it,..................bc Definitely! This is the best program I've seen in a *long* time. -- Tim Maroney, {ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp) hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)