krona@ttds.UUCP (Kjell Krona) (08/30/88)
This message was originally written in answer to a request in alt.hypertext .Since I thought it might have interest for this newsgroup too, please enjoy. (This is my first posting to the net .I might have made some mistakes...) The message refers to "new ways to use HyperTalk" (at least to me, they were...) I have been developing a simple class- system with inheritance, using the message sending mechanism in Hypertalk. I am currently writing a report on this. If someone is interested, I could post a short description of this system. I have founf it quite useful while creating the application discussed below. -- HyperText in HyperCard -- I am currently using HyperCard to create a hypertext application. Propably this will develop into an authoring enviroronment for hypertexts, since I have spent quite some time on developing generic hyperetxt functions in HyperTalk. At the moment, the hypertext is a short bio- graphy on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The stack is structured as several sequences of cards with text and scanned pictures. This sequences can then be acessed from several "indices", presenting the seq- uences in several ways; these are currently: a map, a chronology, a list of houses, and a list of writings. The sequences of cards are not "hard-coded" together; instead I have made special "forward" and "backward" buttons, taking you forward and backward in a list of the cards in a sequence. These lists are stored in fields on a special card, not normally seen by the user. Since these list are complety "context-free", it is possible to jump to a new sequence at any time, saving the old one on a stack, and later popping it back. It is also possible for the user to "record" new sequences trough the cards. These are called "threads" since they were inspired by the so-called "thread"-capablility in Brown's Intermedia system. At the moment I am working on programming refinements, and during the next month I will enclose the functions in a simple authoring system, for users without knowledge of Hypertalk. I hope to have an initial report on the system ready by the end of october (no promises!) I would like to add that HyperCard sorts of "grows on you". I was initially disappointed by the examples provided by HyperCard, and it was only after several months of exploration I tried to create what was initially a simple, albeit large application, and began to discover new ways of using HyperCard and HyperTalk. I think that the capabilities even in the current version of HyperCard are mostly unexplored, even by its creators (Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler, foremost). This might explain the dearth of GOOD examples, which otherwise could stimulate the exploration of new ways with HyperCard. However, if you have acess to the CD-ROM demo disc from Apple, do look closely at the stacks provided! These are very good graphically, and there are some quite interesting scripts hidden there. - Kjell Krona krona@tds.kth.se OR - Dept of Architecture kjell@palladio.kth.se - Royal Institute of Technology S-100 44 Stockholm, SWEDEN