bbenowit@telesci.UUCP (Barry D Benowitz) (10/09/90)
Someone posted a telephone number for Spinnaker that enabled one to get a demo disk of the PLUS PACKAGE that runs under 3.0 MS windows. Would that kind soul re-post or e-mail? Many thanks, -- Barry D. Benowitz EMail: bbenowit@telesci.uucp (...!princeton!telesci!bbenowit) Phone: +1 609 866 1000 x354 Snail: Telesciences CO Systems, 351 New Albany Rd, Moorestown, NJ, 08057-1177
hmarvel@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Howard P Marvel) (05/07/91)
I am looking for some advice on converting HyperCard stacks to run on the IBM PC under Windows. I have converted some HC 1.2.5 stacks to Plus on the Mac and then shipped them to the PC with AFE, but there are a few problems. In particular, Plus comes with a ready-made collection of icons, but I see no way to add icons as resources so that Plus recognizes them. The Plus program appears to have only two icons that are analogous to Macintosh resources. One is the Plus icon and the second is a stack icon. These can appear on the Windows desktop. So apparently Plus has its own icon mechanism. The question is, then, can I somehow add to this internal set? A second question regards documentation. Is there a screen dump utility for Windows that would permit me to save a screen (or preferably a portion thereof) as a TIFF file? I need to retain grays. The screen dumps will go into Pagemaker (Mac version) for documentation. Finally, a few observations. It appears that Plus and Toolbook on a 25mz 386 machine each run at about the speed of HC on a Mac Plus. Is this a consequence of Windows being an inferior substitute for the Mac OS, or is it due to these programs? Secondly, is there a new Windows version in the offing that will fix some of the UAE problems? The current version seems rather unstable. Third, Plus seems a better choice that Convertit and Toolbook, as the latter combination seems really slow and unstable. The Daybook crashed on me, for heaven's sake. Is this a reasonable position or is there perhaps a newer version of Toolbook on the way that solves some of the speed and stability problems? I've had some strange problems with Plus, too, like background graphic objects not carrying their bitmaps from card to card. They seem to work like background fields (HC 1.x version). One other Plus problem is the size of converted stacks--they are huge. My Mac software is distributed on 4 800K diskettes (plus one more for HyperCard 2.0.2). I am looking at twice that amount for the Plus version. I am not sure that many users will want to devote that kind of disk space to stackware (in this case, instructional software for intermediate microeconomics). I'd really appreciate making contact with other persons working with any Plus or Toolbook programmers out there, particularly anyone with experience in converting from the Mac to the PC. My comments above are not intended to demean either the PC or Windows. I actually like PCs (though Windows is just ok). No flames, please. I'd surely prefer help, as I'm getting frustrated. Thanks in advance. hmarvel@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu