lasj@vax5.cit.cornell.edu (05/29/91)
Whilst fiddling with sys 7.0 and HC2.1, I discovered that I could re-name the home stack to "FOO-was home" or anything else. Double-clicking the HyperCard application, stack "FOO-was home" or any other stack results in the dialog: "Where is Home?". Selecting "FOO-was home" >chooses that stack as the home stack<, instaed of resulting in the dialog "Couldn't find Home", thence quitting HyperCard. Selecting another stack, then typing Command-H brings me back to (you guessed it) "FOO-was home". It would seem that the "Home" stack no longer has to be named "Home" in order to function as a "Home" stack (unless, of course, I'm doing something "wrong"!). What a concept... I try to follow this group closely but, so far have yet to hear anyone else comment about this ... did I miss something? Is this a new feature? If someone on the HC team is thinking "Ooops, that's a bug to fix!", may I submit to you, "That's not a bug - that's a feature!", and a great one at that ! Thanks, Larry Slack
jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) (05/29/91)
In article <1991May29.074501.5095@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> lasj@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes: >It would seem that the "Home" stack no longer has to be named "Home" in order >to function as a "Home" stack (unless, of course, I'm doing something >"wrong"!). > >Is this a new feature? If someone on the HC team is thinking "Ooops, that's >a bug to fix!", may I submit to you, "That's not a bug - that's a feature!", >and a great one at that ! No, no one here is saying "ooops" -- it was done intentionally. HyperCard 2.x is a lot smarter about the Mac file system than 1.x was. This feature is just a part of it. Kevin Calhoun jkc@apple.com
jamesth@microsoft.UUCP (James THIELE) (05/31/91)
In article <53440@apple.Apple.COM| jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) writes: | |In article <1991May29.074501.5095@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> |lasj@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes: |>It would seem that the "Home" stack no longer has to be named "Home" in order |>to function as a "Home" stack (unless, of course, I'm doing something |>"wrong"!). |> |>Is this a new feature? If someone on the HC team is thinking "Ooops, that's |>a bug to fix!", may I submit to you, "That's not a bug - that's a feature!", |>and a great one at that ! | |No, no one here is saying "ooops" -- it was done intentionally. | |HyperCard 2.x is a lot smarter about the Mac file system than 1.x was. |This feature is just a part of it. | |Kevin Calhoun |jkc@apple.com So what are the other parts of HC 2.x's newfound file system smarts? James Thiele microsoft!jamesth
jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) (06/02/91)
In article <1991May30.143908.1@gsbacd.uchicago.edu> gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu (opcode ranger) writes: >OK, I'll bite: under HC 2.1, how does HC know which stack is "Home" >(doesn't have to be named 'Home' anymore)? The Home stack still needs to be called "Home" (actually, whatever's in the relevant string resource) for HyperCard to find it automatically on launch. But if HC can't find a Home stack, you can select any stack from the Standard File dialog as your Home stack for that session. Next time you launch HyperCard, it won't remember, so it's not really that big a deal. But it's better than 1.x, which would quit to the Finder if you picked a stack from the Standard File dialog that wasn't named "Home". In article <72664@microsoft.UUCP> jamesth@microsoft.UUCP (James THIELE) writes: >In article <53440@apple.Apple.COM| jkc@Apple.COM (Kevin Calhoun) writes: >>HyperCard 2.x is a lot smarter about the Mac file system than 1.x was. >>This feature is just a part of it. > >So what are the other parts of HC 2.x's newfound file system smarts? I've been waiting since we shipped 2.0 for someone to ask me this question. :-) 1) In a scripting language such as HyperTalk, the only way to refer to files is by string -- but a full pathname is not necessarily a unique name for a file. For example, you can have two floppy disks named "Untitled" on your desktop at the same time, both with files named "Fred" in their root directories. The File Manager, prior to System 7.0, doesn't give an application much help with this kind of situation -- if you ask it to resolve the pathname "Untitled:Fred", it always gives you the "Fred" that's on the first disk that was mounted. Well, suppose the "Fred" on the first disk is a MacWrite document, and the one on the second disk is a HyperCard stack, and the user says 'go stack "Untitled:Fred"'. What's to be done? HyperCard 1.x won't be able to open the stack. Now, with System 7.0's Personal FileShare, more people will have more volumes on their desktop than ever before, and this kind of problem will occur with greater frequency. But not in HyperCard 2.x -- in general, HyperCard 2.x will exhaust all possibilities before giving up on finding the file you specify. It has no problem opening stack Fred, under either System 6.x or 7.0. 2) Even though Apple introduced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) with the Macintosh Plus over five years ago, people are still concerned about whether System 7.0 will work with their old MFS disks. Well, don't bother trying to use them with HyperCard 1.x -- it has a bug that prevents it from opening stacks on MFS disks. I was annoyed by this back when I was working at Dartmouth, and I submitted a fairly petulant bug report about it to HYPERBUG$applelink.apple.com. Sure enough, it came back to haunt me -- I was responsible for fixing it for 2.0. 3) HyperCard 1.x there are two limits on the number of directories in which you can open stacks. First, it has to open a "working directory" for each directory in which it opens a stack. These working direcories remain open until HC quits. Because there's a limit on the number of working directories you can have open at once, you eventually won't be able to open stacks in additional directories. Second, HyperCard 1.x remembers the pathnames of the directories in which it opens stacks in a data structure that's limited to 32K. Once that 32K is full of pathnames, you won't be able to open a stack that's in a directory you haven't visited before. These limitations come into play with large systems of stacks. Since 1987, when HC 1.0 came out, it has become well-known among Macintosh programmers that using working directories and full pathnames is not the right way to do things, but in 1989 someone still had to dig deep into HyperCard and change everything. It was a classic "dirty job". It wasn't easy, and if it was done well hardly anyone would know about it, unless they were told. We were lucky on the HyperCard 2.0 team to have people who were willing to do such "dirty jobs". Those limitations, as well as others I won't mention here, are now gone, and many more things in HyperCard just work the way they should. No glitz, no glamour -- they just work. Kevin Calhoun jkc@apple.com
michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) (06/04/91)
In article <53560@apple.Apple.COM> jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) writes: > > [lots of nifty info about file handling and path management in Hypercard 2.# deleted] Kevin, with all this neato keen path handling, is there *any* way to set up defaut directories for "ask file" and "answer file" to use? I have been desperately seeking a way of doing this, to streamline a stack for novice users... - michael
jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) (06/04/91)
In article <1991Jun4.025351.15538@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes: > ...is there *any* way to set >up defaut directories for "ask file" and "answer file" to use? I have been >desperately seeking a way of doing this, to streamline a stack for novice >users... Yes, but it requires an XCMD. In brief, all you have to do to set the current directory for Standard File is to write the right stuff to two low memory locations. I believe that such an XCMD already exists -- but I can't remember where I saw it. Does anyone have such a thing? Kevin Calhoun jkc@apple.com
vanover@bcsaic.UUCP (Jann VanOver) (06/08/91)
In article <53615@apple.Apple.COM> jkc@Apple.COM (John Kevin Calhoun) writes: > >In article <1991Jun4.025351.15538@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu >(Michael Gemar) writes: >> ...is there *any* way to set >>up defaut directories for "ask file" and "answer file" to use? I have been >>desperately seeking a way of doing this, to streamline a stack for novice >>users... > >Yes, but it requires an XCMD. In brief, all you have to do to set the >current directory for Standard File is to write the right stuff to two >low memory locations. I believe that such an XCMD already exists -- but >I can't remember where I saw it. Does anyone have such a thing? > >Kevin Calhoun >jkc@apple.com Yes - I there's an XFCN that does this in the Support Tools eXternals stack from Apple. The XFCN "SetDefaultDir" is described as "An XFCN to change the default directory to any specified path." I THINK I got this stack from sumex, but may have gotten it from Apple's d e v e l o p magazine. Can anyone give a more positive pointer for people who need this XFCN? Thank's for the question, Michael, and for the clue to the answer, Kevin! Jann "HyperHacker" VanOver vanover@atc.boeing.com
jhs@hutcs.hut.fi (Juho Nikkola) (06/11/91)
In article >Yes, but it requires an XCMD. In brief, all you have to do to set the >current directory for Standard File is to write the right stuff to two >low memory locations. I believe that such an XCMD already exists -- but >I can't remember where I saw it. Does anyone have such a thing? > >Kevin Calhoun Yes, I do. I found it from isca.uiowa.edu, stack named 'Support Tools eXternals v.1.2.5', path /mac/infomac/card/xcmd/support-externals-125.sea Juho