ca0l+@andrew.cmu.edu (Caroline Arms) (04/10/91)
I run a lab with a server full of applications, many of which (say 50) are HyperCard 1.x stacks (mainly medical CAI). We have users who would like to play with 2.0, and announcements of the first products using HyperCard 2.x are arriving in the mail. I was horrified to find that the 2 versions could not coexist. I called Claris, but although I found it easy to get through to someone who appeared to be technically competent, it appears that Claris (or Apple) had not considered the large number of commercially sold stacks that will probably not convert because of incompatible XCMDs or whatever. The developers of several of the stacks we own have made it quite clear that their products will NOT convert. Given a network used mainly by novices, the suggested solutions I have seen so far in this discussion look unworkable. My current approach is based on the fact that I want to get reasonable behavior if someone double-clicks on a stack created by either version, and that we store all applications on a server. Applications that must have write permission to run must be copied to the local hard disk and run from there. The server has HyperCard 1.25 mounted normally, but HyperCard 2 is mounted in archived, self-extracting form (using Compactor). If you double-click on a version 1 stack, it will be "picked up" by the 1.25 version. If you double-click on a version 2 stack, you will get a reasonably explicit error message which should at least prompt users to ask an assistant for help. [You can not use the same trick the other way round, because if version 2 is around, double-clicking on a version 1 stack will result in it being opened in read-only mode by version 2 -- without so much as a message. Since lots of the CAI applications won't run at all in read-only mode because they start by asking you to enter your name or whatever, this is pretty disastrous.] When HyperCard version 2 is needed, users will have to copy the archived file to the local hard disk, double-click on it to expand it, and then open the stack. The procedure takes a little time, but atleast it only consists of operations that even the most novice Mac user should know (dragging icons and double-clicking to open a file). I have actually stored 2 archived versions: one with the Help and Reference stacks etc.(for explorers and developers); and one that has only HyperCard itself and a stripped down Home stack (intended for use with existing stacks, and much faster to copy and expand). If anyone has found a better solution (and one that will continue to be reasonable as the balance between old and new stacks changes), please let me know. Caroline Arms cra@med.pitt.edu
CAH0@bunny.gte.com (Chuck Hoffman) (04/10/91)
In article <Ac0dvQS00WB5ALicsF@andrew.cmu.edu> ca0l+@andrew.cmu.edu
(Caroline Arms) asks about maintaining old stacks which cannot be
converted to HC 2.0 because their vendors depend on XCMDs which will not
convert.
This may be a hair-brained idea, but maybe it will lead to a better idea
from someone else:
I wonder what would happen if you went into the old HyperCard program with
ResEdit, and changed the FREF and BNDL resource to file type "sTAK",
instead of "STAK". Then go to your old stacks and change their type to
"sTAK" as well. Or do a similar thing with the creator id instead of the
file type id. Or do both. Now the operating system would see the old
HyperCard and old stacks as something entirely different from the new
HyperCard and stacks.
Has anyone tried anything like this?
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