hmarvel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Howard P. Marvel) (09/11/90)
I have seen a number of remarks about PC HyperCard versions, but little that suggests that the remark is based on hands-on experience. I got to try ToolBook yesterday running on a 33mhz PC. It was not optimized as per the ToolBook manual, but I was not supposed to fool with CONFIG.SYS on the machine. ToolBook suggests FILES=40, BUFFERS=40, and my settings appeared to be BUFFERS=10, FILES=30. With this caveat, the performance was simply atrocious. Has anyone had experience with running ToolBook with varying settings for these parameters? Does it make a big difference? ToolBook looks great, but with this sort of performance, those who compare it to HyperCard on a Plus are being unfair to Apple. My second query regards PLUS, the HyperCard clone that supposedly makes translation to both Windows and the Presentation Manager relatively painless. Can anyone offer some impressions about performance? Thanks in advance.
lowersbp@infonode.ingr.com (Ben P Lowers) (09/12/90)
I have used PLUS on the Macintosh for a couple of months. It IS essentially HyperCard 1.2.5 plus some stuff, minus some speed. We specifically needed it for putting gray scales in the card window so that we could put buttons on top of them... It has a funny tool pallette/message box thingamujig, but it does offer all kinds of styled fields and graphics objects like polygons. And it beats the pants off of SuperCard with regards to stack development turnaround time. Also, there are a lot of authoring-related things that you CAN'T do in SuperCard, that you CAN do in PLUS, and even HyperCard, such as choose the brush tool domenu "Paste" (some PICT or paint graphic was on the Clipboard) choose the browse tool I couldn't do that in SuperCard. But with PLUS, if the Clipboard has a color or gray scale PICT in it - BOOM! You've got an awesome card window, all done for the user at the scripting level. I have also seen a Beta of PLUS for Windows 3.0. It is essentially the Mac version ON A PC. I saw it on a 16MHz XT, and it didn't fly, It was a bit slower than Hypercard 1.0 on a Macintosh Plus. But the key is, it brings just about ALL of that capibility to the PC! But NO XCMDs and NO XFCNs. Maybe the announced Slot Developer's Toolkit will solve all of the problems with externals. It doesn't sound near as bad as the reports we getting about how BAD ToolBook is. For you own Beta, you can apply with: Spinnaker Software Cambridge, MA (617) 494-1200 Good luck, and anyway, running HyperCard 2.0 or PLUS on a Macintosh is a lot less grief... -- Ben Lowers | Intergraph Corp. lowersbp@ingr.com or | Huntsville,AL 35894-0001 uunet!ingr!b23b!big!ben | (205) 730-8599
alcmist@well.sf.ca.us (Frederick Wamsley) (09/13/90)
In article <4581@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu> hmarvel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Howard P. Marvel) writes: >I got to try ToolBook yesterday running on a 33mhz PC. It was not >optimized as per the ToolBook manual, but I was not supposed to fool >with CONFIG.SYS on the machine. ToolBook suggests FILES=40, >BUFFERS=40, and my settings appeared to be BUFFERS=10, FILES=30. With >this caveat, the performance was simply atrocious. Has anyone had >experience with running ToolBook with varying settings for these >parameters? Toolbook can be pretty disk-intensive so you should see a real improvement from anything that speeds up disk access. The single most important variable is the amount of RAM available to Windows. If it's less than 1M performance will be atrocious indeed. From 1M to 1.5M it's still slow. By 2M or so it's leveled off. The first thing to try, though, is switching Toolbook from color to black&white (which incidentally makes it more comparable to Hypercard). Setting startupSysColors=false in the Toolbook section of WIN.INI (the Windows 3.0 configuration file) will give you large and unmistakable speedups. This will reduce the memory demands too. (Should this move to comp.windows.ms? I'm not sure I should be talking about my employer's product in comp.sys.mac.hypercard). -- Fred Wamsley {ucbvax,pacbell,apple,hplabs}!well!alcmist; CIS 72247,3130; GEnie FKWAMSLEY; USPS - why bother? "There's a perfectly logical explanation for all this"
LB7@psuvm.psu.edu (Lorinda L. Brader) (09/14/90)
In article <1990Sep12.143927.7489@infonode.ingr.com>, lowersbp@infonode.ingr.com (Ben P Lowers) says: > >It doesn't sound near >as bad as the reports we getting about how BAD ToolBook is. Although ToolBook is considerably slower, in general the features of ToolBook blow HyperCard 1.2 right out of the water! However, HyperCard 2.0 and ToolBook are very similar. There are some features of ToolBook that are better than HyperCard 2.0 and some that are not as good as those in HyperCard 2.0. (One that is worse is speed of execution.) Overall the concepts and functionality of HyperCard 2.0 and ToolBook are very similar.