rburns@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Randy Burns) (01/22/88)
I have been using Hypercard for the first time this week. I am quite favorably impressed for the most part: Hypercard provides a lot of functionality for non-programmers and an interesting environment for programmers who want easy access to some of the toolkits resources. I do feel however, that Hypercard will need some substantial improvement to fulfill its potential. My understanding is that Hypercard was meant to provide a means of truly electronic publishing, i.e. putting creation of electronic books into the hands of non-programmers. Hypercards ability to let users establish links between cards and buttons is the one of the best examples of this type of functionality. However, I feel this functionality will need to be substantially expanded. For example, to do anything with charts, one needs to make fairly extensive use of the the HyperTalk language(and the resulting scripts run pretty slowly). I would like end users to have the ability to define a link between a field and a 'Chart Object', without needing to look at scripts. The lack of a spreadsheet type of field is also a deficiency. I would also like to see a visual representation of functions and the relation between the parameters and the result of functions. This might allow programmers to create 'Stacks' of financial or scientific formulas or special interest functions that could be easily used with publications created by users with minimal knowledge of scripting. I mention these on this bulletin board because I hope someone from Apple is listening and feel these changes really should be made in the Hypercard product itself rather than added chaotically by desk accessories and XFNS. Still, I like this product. I think Hypercard is a revolutionary step forward and intend to use it extensively.