xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) (04/27/91)
Just want to mention in passing that there _does_ exist a commercial hypertext product for the Amiga, called Thinker, advertised in several of the Amiga magazines, and relatively moderately priced ($80). The included graphics software is total garbage, but the hypertext package itself seems rock solid and is a lot of fun. If about 50,000 of you rag on me constantly, I might get the review written that I promised the author back in August. What I wouldn't give for a working mind. Kent, the man from xanth. <xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>
GIAMPAL@auvm.auvm.edu (04/29/91)
In article <1991Apr27.005035.12723@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) says: >Just want to mention in passing that there _does_ exist a commercial >hypertext product for the Amiga, called Thinker, advertised in several >of the Amiga magazines, and relatively moderately priced ($80). The >included graphics software is total garbage, but the hypertext package >itself seems rock solid and is a lot of fun. Yes, Thinker is a solid product, but the intent is quite different from HT. First off, Thinker is also an editor, not just a hypertext program (which is fine if you like Thinker as an editor). Second, Thinker is intended for _very_ large documents and so it uses some kind of buffering scheme to keep only a part of the file in memory at once. This is great if you have a nice fast hard disk, but with floppies it is unbearable. Third, Thinker in the last incarnation I used was 165K in size. HT is < 45K in size, something that all of us with only 1 meg of memory have to take into consideration. Thinker is an interesting product and does have some features I wish were in HT. You really have to look and see what you want to do with hypertext to decide which is appropriate. I don't like Thinker as an editor, and so wouldn't want to use it. Thinker also keeps your files in a proprietary (binary) format, something I don't appreciate too much, but then again it can include graphics directly in the document (whereas HT would just have the picture displayed). Like I said, you need to look at the two and see which one suits your needs better. >If about 50,000 of you rag on me constantly, I might get the review >written that I promised the author back in August. What I wouldn't give Mike Meyer already wrote a very nice review for the hypermedia mailing list. I'll try and forward that along to the net (or maybe mike can re-post it here). --dominic
mwm@pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) (04/30/91)
In article <91118.163414GIAMPAL@auvm.auvm.edu> GIAMPAL@auvm.auvm.edu writes: >If about 50,000 of you rag on me constantly, I might get the review >written that I promised the author back in August. What I wouldn't give Mike Meyer already wrote a very nice review for the hypermedia mailing list. I'll try and forward that along to the net (or maybe mike can re-post it here). Here's that article. I'd still like to see a formal review from Kent. After-the-fact-Notes: The thinker 2.0 demo is now available for FTP. The last few paragraphs are talking about my offline bix reader that runs in thinker. It's been significantly expanded since then, and I may actually release sometime soon... <mike cc: hyperami@mento.acs.unc.edu Subject: Thinker summary Ultrix: Will drive you to drink. Date: Thu, 25 Oct 90 10:52:57 PDT From: Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer <mwm> Apparently, this didn't make it out. Apologies if you've seen it before. The BADGE meeting for October was on the 18th. The featured speaker was Allan Baumberger, the author of Thinker, demoing Thinker and discussing the economics of marketing software out of your house. For this summary, the latter part of the talk will be ignored. The software was run on my 3000, with demos running from the internal floppy, provided by Alan. The display was SLACs RGB projection system. Thinker is a true "chunky" hypertext system, built into a standard outliner program. It's "chunky" because the smallest unit that a link can point at is a statement. This is just a chunk of text, with an optional label. Statements are also the most basic unit of the outliner. All the standard outliner facilities are there - adding subordinate statements; moving a statement and all it's subordinate statements; sorting/moving/deleteing a group of statements at the same level along with their subordinate statements, etc. Labels on statements are what make them targets for hypertext links. A label is text surrounded by parenthesis at the beginning of a statement. Multiple labels can be added to a statement as comma separated strings in the parentheses. Labels can be either displayed or hidden while reading the document. A straight text link is a file name and a label in that file. Displaying a statement by label can happen in a number of ways, the most useful being by clicking on text in a document. The standard way to denote a target is to surround the text by angle brackets. This overrides the other alternatives. Clicking on plain text causes the word around the mouse pointer to be used as a target, and a branch to that label is attempted. Finally, 2.0 introduces the ability to have text in a different style (italic, bold, underscored, different colors), and all contiguous text in something other than the default style can be treated as a target to branch to. The simplest targets are plain labels. The current document is searched for them. A different thinker document can be searched by prepending the file name and a comma. This is not a simple word, and must use angle brackets or text styles. CLI commands can be issued, and ARexx ports addressed as targets. This allows communications with other ARexx-capable programs, including launching them. There's an object-oriented drawing program included with Thinker that demonstrates these capabilities. Thinker opens an ARexx port, and can accept commands from it. The commands may update the display, but don't have to. This allows programs capable of sending ARexx commands (the draw program mentioned previously) to cause Thinker to display text associated with some action on the draw program. Thinker can be run in a mode with no open window for database updates if so desired. The ARexx interface grew, and wasn't really designed. This causes unexpected problems and limitations in the system. ILBM images can be linked to, or included directly in a Thinker window. You can't have links from inside the image, though. However, TinyDraw allows ARexx commands to be attached to objects, which can cause messages to be sent to Thinker. Thus, you can have images that invoke text, and vice versa. Various options include whether you jump based on text on a single click or a double click; whether jumps just happen or there's a confirm step that allows the users to choose a window; and a non-confirmed jump goes to a default window for all such jumps, or happens in the active window. The major drawback is that Thinker doesn't have a reader, and isn't in widespread usage. That means that you either have to buy copies of Thinker for everyone who needs one or limit yourself to the capabilities of the demo version. This means that you can't save documents, and the largest document that can be handled is something under 100K in size (supposedly, the thinker demo is going to appear on an FTP site in the near future). The Thinker-based BIX reader is primarily a database. It uses the outline features of Thinker to mimic the BIX message database structure. There's an index file of new articles that is used to keep track of what has and hasn't been read. Each message has a target for finding the the message it's a comment on, so that going back is a matter of clicking on that target. The interface is driven by function keys, as Thinker doesn't provide any simpler ways to run ARexx macros. F1 deletes the index entry and goes to the next message; F2 moves the index entry to save it, and goes to the next entry. F3 goes back to the current index entry. It works fine as a means of reading the messages sequentially, and provides the search facitilies of Thinker to the database. Next month is the last HyperThingy talk at BADGE scheduled so far, a demo of presentation building with AmigaVision. I'll post a similar summary after that. -- Kiss me with your mouth. Mike Meyer Your love is better than wine. mwm@pa.dec.com But wine is all I have. decwrl!mwm Will your love ever be mine?