engst@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Adam C. Engst) (05/09/88)
In article <4187@dasys1.UUCP> newsome@dasys1.UUCP (Richard Newsome) writes: > >We now have Hypercard at work; I spent a few hours tonight >playing around with it. It seems like a ridiculously elaborate >writing tool built around two concepts: A) allowing instant >wormholing between any two pages if they have been marked to >connect up to each other; and B) permitting the installation >of pictures, sound and even programs in the middle of a document. That sounds about right from what I've heard and seen too, although the interesting part is that it is a tool for writing programs, something that hasn't been seen yet, as far as I can tell. As far as text goes, it is somewhat limited by the card size, and very limited by its inability to keep a button associated with a word in scrolling text. This would be necessary if it were to be used for hypertext as such. Where it will be useful is in sophisticated front-ends for teaching and end-user programs, both inside of and outside of Hypercard itself. > The wormholing feature allows elaborate forms of >indexing, footnoting, and glossarization. You can write a >definition of a key term, and then pipe the definition to every page >on which the term appears. Or you can take a subtopic and link >together all the pages on which the subtopic is referred to, so >that you can quickly page from one reference to the next. But see what I said about about using it for real textual use. I also think I've heard that it doesn't allow different fonts on the same page, which would be much more Mac-like. >All that being said; is it worth getting excited about? If >you buy a printed textbook with an index and a glossary you >can flip around inside the book the same way you do in Hypercard. Yeah, but nowhere nearly as easily. >I'm not sure that the Macintosh, as a reading machine, will ever >replace te printed book: too much eyestrain. As for illustrations; >high-resolution graphics on a monitor don't compare with even the >poorest quality printed graphics. The screen is a problem, I admit, but the beauty of the graphics are the number of them that are easily available on the Mac through clip-art and scanned images. It is much harder to get images and put them into a printed book, believe me, I know from publishing a literary magazine here at Cornell. Everything we can scan and Laserprint is easy and cheap in comparison to the stuff we have to have the printers do because we can't get a good enough resolution from the scanner and printer. >Music is nice, but it >eats up so much memory you won't see much installed in Hypercard stacks. >It makes a lot more sense to listen to a Walkman while you read your >printed book. That's true, which is why Hypercard has hooks for CD-ROMs. Also, I can't imagine little printed instructions on the screen to turn your tape on and off so that you get the proper music/sounds. Actually, I can imagine it, and it would be clutzy at best. >Adding program buttons to a text is interesting, >but I can't think of many really great applications that don't >already exist. I'll agree with that somewhat, although I can think of some teaching applications that it might help with. >MOst of the sample card stacks >I looked at were just liking paging through a children's >book with lots of illustrations and very large type. True, but that's the author's problem, not the program's. >The limits of CRT monitors create a bottleneck in throwing >words up on the screen; so that large documents will require >large numbers of screens that will make complex interconnection >of screens more a necessity than an added attraction. Also true, which is what Guide is betting on to stay in the hypertext editor market. >Richard Newsome >Big Electric Cat Public UNIX >..!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!newsome Adam -- Adam C. Engst engst@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu pv9y@cornella.bitnet "If it's not interactive, it's not fun."