"I have participated in several of these chats and learned a good deal. IMHO, the hypercard area in AOL is the best single source on the internet for hypercard resources though there are certainly many other good sources. The tutorial stacks that the staff has produced are simply outstanding. If you use or program in HC, this area alone justifies an AOL membership."
-- Jim Kalmbach, posting to the HyperCard mailing list
What are the Scripting Conference stacks?
The America Online Scripting Conference provided one of the best ways to get hands-on experience with HyperCard. Each conference presented a specific HyperCard-related topic, examined in detail. In most cases, a HyperCard expert prepared a topic stack for members to download and study before the conference discussion. At the conference itself, the stack author presented the material and answered any questions members may have had. Members were encouraged to bring their own scripts to the conference for personalized help with scripting solutions.Below are the stacks presented at the AOL Scripting Conferences from 1995 to 1997. These are some of the most comprehensive HyperCard references and tutorials you will find anywhere. Each stack contains not only a complete discussion of how a particular aspect of HyperCard works, but also scripting examples, working models, and in some cases toys and games, to demonstrate the ideas being presented. These stacks are a wealth of information, beautifully presented.
While each topic stack represents its respective author's style, script examples, and content, each topic is consistently presented within the framework of a reference stack written by Jeff Crossley, who also moderated the discussions. His presentation vehicle itself is an excellent example of many HyperCard features and concepts, and serves as an educational tool in its own right.
Why is HyperActive Software presenting these?
Jacqueline Landman Gay of HyperActive Software was also leader of the HyperCard Forum on America Online until it closed in 2000. Because of a desire to spread information and knowledge about HyperCard, and because of the many requests for these stacks, we've made the Scripting Conference stacks available here. You will find them below along with Jeff Crossley's original file descriptions, slightly edited and with outdated information removed.
How to participate
Some of the older stacks contain outdated information about conference schedules. Scripting conferences are no longer being held, and in fact, AOL has closed the HyperCard Forum.
The StacksPage 1
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Find Command - HCSC 022795 (133384 bytes)
This stack contains narratives discussing the use of the Find command, example scripts, and a Visual Find demo that simulates each step in a find activity and generates a report of why or why not a find succeeded. Visual Find is intended to help users grasp the variations between the five "find" forms, and to test their own search examples in the Visual Find format.
This conference topic addresses the use of visual effects in card transitions and related issues.
This conference topic addresses the use of the HyperTalk "sort" command to order cards and data containers in HyperCard. Stacks include sorting multiple fields using any field as the sort key ... an operational data base example for card sorts which includes a reporting function, and a Data Viewer example that shows how to view a field whose data width exceeds the card width.
These stacks contain narratives discussing how HyperCard treats text as data.
This file contains narratives discussing how to script for color and black & white simultaneously in single or multiple stack HyperCard environments. Scripts are explained and demonstrated with two additional stacks showing stack to stack transitions.
This file contains narratives discussing how to use the "play" command to add sound to your stacks. Scripts are explained and demonstrated including a keyboard demo where pressed keys are converted to American music notation for use in play command syntax. Includes using "play" to play a recorded sound and using sounds as notes that HyperCard can play as music with a single resource as the note source. Includes explanations of various sound file formats, how to install sounds in your stacks, and a script library of example scripts.
This file contains narratives discussing the use of HyperCard's text assembling techniques to retrieve and manipulate text data, create scripts from within scripts, and a primer on text concatenation (assembling parts into a whole). See the prior topic stack "HCSC 031395 Text Chunks" for information about how HyperCard sees and defines text data.
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All contents copyright (C) 1996, HyperActive Software. All rights reserved.
Revised: October 7, 1998
URL: http://www.hyperactivesw.com/HCSC.html
