I have been using HyperCard for more than 10 years. In 1988 I built an application for evaluation of diplomas from foreign countries for the Swedish National Board for Universities and Colleges. There are 13 persons working with the system. It was aimed to be a prototype for two years, but are still working. It is a client server application, all built by stacks. Two years ago they decided to build a new system. A Company got the job. They used 4D and an Informix database, but they could not get the same functionality as the old HyperCard system. Two weeks ago they decided to skip the new system (cost 80,000 $) and continue with my old HC system. The persons working with the program reminded me that when they asked for some changes it was always possible to do it. When they asked the guys using 4D they too often got the answer "The program does not allow us to do that". Just now I am working with web applications using HyperCard. The great success was the invoice writer for travelling expenses, which is very complicated due to the Swedish taxation laws. Last year there was about 15,000 accesses to the program. The form is very simple to fill in. The HyperCard program does all the calculations. The personal data is stored in text files. The first time you have to fill in the form complete. Next time you use the form you only need to fill in your social security number. The result is sent back to the user within 4 to 10 seconds. The newest program is a "Project Manager Program." It is not a program for a single project, but it gives a good view over all projects within a department. It is also a Web program. It is a very good combination to use HyperCard's database with the programming in hypertalk. For text processing e.g. to create html text HyperCard is excellent! When I started to make Web pages there was no editor that was able to convert Swedish umlauts aao to html entities so I wrote an HTLM-HyperEditor myself using HyperCard. I offered this as freeware and it has been downloaded more than 10,000 times. (http://www.lu.se/info/Editor). And who am I? I am 62 years old, self-educated, never touch a computer before 1986. I have worked as director for the Counselling Office at Lund University for many years. The last three years I have worked as IT consultant within the administration of Lund University. In three weeks I will retire!
Comments to: Lars-Olof Albertson
I create various stacks to help with the role-playing games I run. RPGs are a specialised market, so there is very little software around for them, and I tend to write what I need in HyperCard -- and I can create *exactly* what I need. I don't want to waste years and brain cells on mastering and using a low-level programming language, and can get useful things going reasonably quickly. I've released one such stack to the Internet: Weather 2.1. Gamemasters seem to like it, and some writers have used it too, since it got distributed on a MacFormat CD-ROM. It's available on Info-Mac under Games. I released version 2.1 anonymously, but the next version goes out under my own name, soon (-ish). Weather is a weather-generating system for any role-playing game. It lets you add realistic weather and other background information to your game without spending ages in preparation. You can customise a calendar and weather pattern for your own world, or simply use one of the calendars supplied or available. Temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, and wind are all calculated, along with the hours of daylight, the phases of the moon or moons, and how far you can see at any hour of the day or night in all weather conditions.
Comments to: Malcolm Bowers
My partner and I started a precision analog electronics manufacturing company 5 years ago. The corporation is now a manufacturer of precision measurement devices for government, contractors, engineers, and education alike. The key to developing the companies product line was to develop multiple products from one circuit board. This can be done by substituting different pieces into various locations on the circuit during the board stuffing phase. Board stuffing is a process in which the assembler puts all the necessary chips, diodes, capacitor etc. into the etched, silk screened circuit board. Once the board is stuffed it can then be wave soldered and incorporated with the other elements of the product like the front panels and knobs. As we were a small company we needed a process by which a minimum wage employee could come in and stuff the boards containing over 250 possible parts, into the over 100 different per board. Once more, the boards needed to be different from batch to batch depending on the model that was being produced. As a minimum wage employee could not be expected to read a circuit schematic and have a scientific calculator handy to crank capacitor values before the placement of each part. It was determined that we would need to arrange some sort of Tele-Prompter to guide the assembler through the process. After researching various software options on both platforms we determined that Hypercard was the only program that could act like a teleprompter but be flexible enough to calculate the parts needed for different products in minutes without the invlovement of management staff. Better still, Hypercard could do it in such a way that the assembler could do the whole assembly process from start to finish without the aid of a manager. The stack we call "the assembly stack", stores scans of the empty (unstuffed) boards, and has a record of all the parts inventoried. The assembler tells the computer what products are to be assembled during the working day. The computer advises the assembler which boards to use in the production batch and then guides the user through each spot on each board. To minimize confusion the program has the user open each part bin only once, each time the program calculates in advance the total number of pieces from the bin that will be needed. For each piece that is to be placed the program then shows the user a picture of the space on the board where the part is to go. Users like the "assembly stack" because it is friendly. It uses sounds and animations. Moving from step to step is easy, once the user is done with a part they just hit the forward arrow button to continue. In a world of memory hungry bloatware Hypercard was invaluable to us, in the start up days a couple years ago. A stack can run on even the oldest Mac, some having less than two and a half megabytes of memory, and still use sounds and animations. These flexible requirements saved the company alot of money when it needed it most. Hypercard helped seat the Mac in our company. It is unusual for an electronics firm to use Macintoshes. The fact is CAD-Star, and Auto-CAD dominate the electronics manufacturing market and these programs don't run on macs. Yet, as time has gone on, HyperCard has demonstrated that everything else in electronic production CAN be done on a Mac. Hypercard is also used as a timeclock for production workers, an inventory tracker, a log book, a quality control procedure stack and much more. Best of all, all the stacks are connected through a common, familiar home screen. Hypercard generated an interest in an all PC company that has changed the platform balance. After learning about Macs, workers preferred them to PCs. All networked computers at the company are now Macintoshes, and the Sales and Marketing office is exclusively Macintosh. Henry Ford would have liked HyperCard, it is an invaluable tool to a great manufacturing assembly line.
Comments to: Quinn Carver
HyperCard has become for me an integration tool. Several years ago I started using HyperCard to prepare lecture materials for teaching Microbiology to first year dental students. I found that the flexiblity of HyperCard faciltated the organization of my lecture outlines and slides. Using these stacks as a foundation, it was easy to develop them into interactive tutorials that the students could use to review and supplement the lecture materials and prepare for exams. The tutorial stacks use interactive links, animations, and speech to emphasize concepts. The best feature was that the tutorials could demonstrate relationships between topics or principles that would otherwise be more difficult to grasp when presented in disparate lectures. This year I hope to take better advantage of the built-in QuickTime features. The tutorials have continued to grow in size and complexity so that this past year, for the first time, they were distributed on a CD using a HyperCard stack as a front end launcher. The integration theme was continued when I modified the stacks for lecture and seminar presentations. I can now bring my PowerBook to the lecture hall and use HyperCard to "run the show". The only limitation so far has been the lack of cross platform support since a significant number of students only have access to PCs.
Comments to: Joseph DiRienzo, Ph.D.
In my work teaching engineering and doing research, I use a half-dozen computing environments on a day-to-day basis, from Fortran to Excel. HyperCard is my favorite and the one in which I'm most productive. Why? HyperCard is complete and scalable. "Complete" because, with it, I can do all sorts of things: * keep my calendar and my personal notes * maintain a database of research papers * process manuscripts to add reference citations and a reference list in final format * do quick calculations of one-line math expressions or complex formulae * construct interactive instructional software "Scalable" because I can use it for very simple tasks involving no programming (e.g., drawing a funny picture, adding two numbers in the message box, making a simple database) to complex, large-scale projects involving dozens of linked stacks with animated graphics and "number crunching" (e.g., integration of differential equations). Another reason I like to do as many things in HyperCard as I can is that it is extremely easy to "customize" stacks. An example: I still use the old calendar and address book shipped with the HyperCard package. However, over the years I've modified the scripts to make these stacks easier to use (for my wife and kids) and more powerful (for all of us). Screen shots and download links to two of my instructional software packages can be accessed at my web page. Both are "standalones" and do not require HyperCard or the Player: http://www-ames.ucsd.edu/RESEARCH/HERZ/ "The Reactor Lab" is a simulation of a chemical reactor laboratory. The interface was designed to allow ANYONE (even you) to run experiments with no training or instruction. In addition to being an illustration of an easy-to-use interface to a complex software package, it is also an illustration that HyperCard, running on today's computers, can be used for reasonably serious "number crunching," though, of course, it isn't the first choice if that were the only task. "True BASIC Reference" is a guide to the True BASIC computer language (True BASIC is a trademark of True BASIC, Inc.). It is designed for use to help teach beginners how to program. Richard K. Herz, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering Department of Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences University of California at San Diego San Diego, California, USA 92093
Comments to: Richard K. Herz
One of the coolest things I do in hypercard is making games but right now, I want to talk about one week of school. It began like any normal week. Then, I had math class. My teacher told us we had to do a project on a famous mathametician. I chose Ada Lovelace. Since Ada was the first programmer (She programmed Charles Babbages Anylitical Engine), I thought it would be fitting to make a hypercard stack about her as my project (well, it's easy and in some ways, you could consider it programming). I spent the weekend drawing pictures, making interactive stuff, and doing other cool stuff. Eventually, I had a nice presentation that was much better than some slide show or poster board. When I presented my report in the school library, you should have seen the expression on the superintendent's eyes. It was really cool and I got a lot of respect from other students. Hypercard really works for me. I've made quite a few different kinds of games in hypercard. Some range from the submersive reality type games (like Myst and Riven, which happen to be written in HyperCard), to Arcade type games and Adventure games (like Collosal Cave). I've even done Tile Graphic type adventures (like ultima, Exile, and many other games). Hypercard is a truly powerful solution building system.
Comments to: Paul Ingemi
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