ralphm@leland.Stanford.EDU (Ralph Melton) (03/15/91)
Aargh. What is the truly neato way to make interactive hot text in HyperCard 2.0? By "interactive", I mean that you can type a word into a field, and then say "take me there," and have it obey you. This falls into several questions, all of which I would appreciate the answers to, even if they're not necessarily relevant: 1) What is the best user interface for the "take me there" part? How ought I to distinguish between when the user wants to add topics, and when the user wants to use these as hot text? How can I achieve the desired goals of being efficient for an expert user without being arcane to a novice? Clearly, the desired interface is that when I click the mouse, the computer should read my mind, figure out exactly what I want to do, and then do it, without worrying any other interface details. However, my "ReadMind" XFCN is not ready yet. (But just wait for its companion, "WriteMind"!) ( :-), in case you hadn't guessed.) I have two fields that are supposed to contain user-definable hot text. I'm currently working on two methods of handling the hot text/ editing text distinction. In one of the fields, which I conceive to be rarely changed, I keep the field locked most of the time. A normal click is hot text and goes to the card referenced by the ClickText. Option-Clicking in the field sets the insertion point for editing. I expect the other field to be modified more often, so I would like simple clicking to position the insertion point. Here, should I use an option- click to make it act like hot text, a Command-K to use the SelectedText as hot text, or, say, a button? Or am I forgetting something entirely? I would prefer to use the same technique for both fields, because I think it would be much more intuitive to do so. Any suggestions? 2) What is the nice way to determine the item which contains the selection or the ClickLoc? I would like to have my hot text to consist of more than single words, but I am having problems with the grouped style. If I could easily determine the item which the user was indicating, I think that would work well. But I can find no nice way to identify an item, other than by searching for commas. I get the feeling that I'm overlooking something very obvious and elegant. 3) How can you assign the contents of one field to another, preserving styles? This is my problem with grouped text. I used grouped text for a while, but when I tried to import one stack into another, I lost all my carefully created groupings. Again, I feel that I'm missing something very simple. Thanks in advance, and kudos to the HyperCard gurus (especially the Apple ones) who give the net the benefit of their expertise, Ralph Melton -- Ralph Melton The White Rabbit ralphm@portia.stanford.edu "An algorithmic tour de force. Best of all, it seems to work."