It is difficult to limit this statement! The most extensive things I have done with Hypercard include: 1) A media catalog and booking system that allows reserving of some 8000 media items and keeps track of who request what when. It is essentially a three file relational database. The program also prints catalogs and is searchable at a high speed. 2) A series of programs called "Clip Creator" that simplify excerpting Audio CDs, Laserdisks, MIDI files and QuickTime Movies. Sets of clips can be accumulated and used in a series of drill and practice exercises or used interactively along with comments and hot spots in the comments to automate a multimedia presentation. Also included in the set is "Clip Chart" which allows users to created an analysis of a musical work along with a related graphic representation of the analysis and comments that pop up as the analysis is played. This set of programs is in use at colleges and K12 institutions around the world, and I'm (impatiently) waiting for version 3 of Hypercard to bring the capabilities of this very useful tool to music instructors who insist on using Windows machines. 3) A set of spelling drill programs what allow instructors to create sets of spelling words, common misspellings, sample sentences and voice recordings of the word and the sentences. The program will produce pencil and paper tests, and a series of interactive spelling "games" that allow the student to learn to spell. They can even hear their own teacher say the word and the sentence. Various kinds of help are provided when errors are made. 4) A set of programs that interact with a CD-ROM produced by the state of Minnesota FACs project that provide linkages to ninety some samples of world music and 50 or 60 art works (in JPEGs). Extensive cross-referencing of these works is provided and a simple means of marking cards and following progress through the cards provides ways for teachers or students to organize the information to make presentations from it. These materials were distributed statewide to the K12 schools. 5) A Hypercard interactive front end to the award winning University of Delaware Video Disk Music Series that provides simple access to the musical works (with analysis of those works) and to the mre than 5000 still images on the video disk set. I could multiply these examples, but the point is clear. Hypercard is a fast efficient database and multimedia tool. It is my tool of choice for many projects, and is one I would use much more if it were update and provided a means for Windows users to take advantage of the things I have developed. Chuck Boody Analyst/Programmer ISD 270
Comments to: Chuck Boody
I have recently started a stack in HyperCard that is a database of every reptile species that can be found in and around my capital city. I have text fields for things like size, appearance etc, and then colour pictures, movies, and sounds. I chose HyperCard because it lets me design the stack the way I want it. I can also save it as a stand-alone application, and distribute it to others.
Comments to: Stewart Macdonald
Ok, let me just tell you that I have not finished this program yet, but I will be very very soon - It is a complete organizational system for teachers in which to keep track of everthing from attendance to marks to lesson plans, times and special days, as well as little things such as reminders on student birthdays, individual performance graphs, personalized thank you notes, even ways to dismiss the class at the end of the day. My latest addition that I am currently working on is an emergency medical help feature - eg. a student is having a seizure or something and it will tell you what to do. I'm running out of ideas for more things to do with this stack! I've also made some different versions of games like Clue, Monopoly, and Balderdash, too. I just recently bought a new Mac G3-266 with 96 RAM and a 15" monitor and the switch between it and my old 9MHz Classic with 2 RAM and a 9" B&W monitor was seamless. Thank you, Apple computer, for making such a great product.
Comments to: Jason Ruhl
After retiring after some 30 years of programming and management, I spent more time gardening. But, being an engineer, I needed to keep track of the plants as well as enjoy them. The things to keep track of for a plant include its name, shape, size, color, ..., etc., and where it is, because labels disappear. So I bought a Mac with HyperCard, and started developing the "garden information manager", or "gim" (pronounced "jim") which is essentially an inventory control program for a garden. After it was working pretty well for me, I decided to see how it would work for other gardeners. That led to six months working with a public garden to add other features they needed. Some of the challenges including handling really BIG fields of plant names, etc., handling large numbers of cards (gim uses one card per plant as an accession record, and some gardens have many thousands of plants), making it work for first-time users who don't have a clue as to delicate a computer program really is, restricting certain features by user level, and maps. gim is now quite bullet-proof, and has a rather nice mapping capability which allows scrolling over your garden, moving plants around in your garden, "growing" your plants, showing just selected plants, zooming in in a particular area of the garden, etc. gim customers now include public gardens and private gardeners, located from New York to Hawaii. In all but one case, the customers are first-time Mac users, and most of the private gardeners are first-time computer users. Oakhill Associates 585 Ransier Drive Hendersonville, NC 28739 1-800-GIM-0428
Comments to: Bob Stelloh
I have made a complete HTML editor in HyperCard, called "HTML TagWriter". I wrote my first webpages in TeachText, but I soon got bored having the same tags again and again. In stead of buying an editor, I made my own. With 6 years of scripting experience (I started when I was 14), it was really easy to write the necessary handlers. I've tried to learn C, but I gave up: way too difficult. The things which could not be scripted without a severe slowdown, like pop-up menus and text convertors, are handled by XFCNs which can be found in most XFCN archives. A great advantage of HC is that it's tremendously easy to modify things or add new elements. When I discover a bug, or something which doesn't work good enough, it's fixed within a few minutes. I didn't even take lessons to learn HyperCard. I just started working with it and by looking how the example stacks worked, I first modified them, and then started to make new stacks, first funny stacks which weren't particularly useful, but after a while I made adventure games... The only reason why these games are not available is that they're not finished... It's so hard finding a decent ending for such a game! I made other utilities too, like a stack which makes a list of the contents of floppy disks (becoming outdated, indeed!) and a stack to manage my tons of past e-mails (I really can't throw things away). I even made a stack which converts images into cylindrical projections which can then be merged into a QTVR panorama... But I must admit that that one is pretty slow. However, it shows that HyperCard is pretty good at Maths too, and I used this feature to make stacks which draw graphs and 3D-wire models of mathematical functions. For who might be interested in the HTML TagWriter stack: http://cryogen.com/dr.lex/tagwriter The Panorama stack is available at: http://cryogen.com/dr.lex/qtvr/makepano.html Other utilities (mostly mathematical) can be found at: http://urc1.cc.kuleuven.ac.be/~m9608615/software/3dstuff.html
Comments to: Alexander Thomas
Hypercard is the brains behind the Periodic Table Challenge web page (http://www.chem.uky.edu/misc/periodicquiz.html) recently featured in both the New York Times as well as Chemical & Engineering News. Alas, Hypecard was not mentioned by name, but then again neither was I! The Periodic Table Challenge is a *blank* periodic table. Users are challenged to fill in the table and then submit their entry. Hypercard scores their answers, makes a comment or two and even adds a line of chemical trivia before returning a response to the user. It's a valuable tool for learning (not merely memorizing) the periodic table and is of particular use to higher level chemistry students.
Comments to: Robert Toreki
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Revised: November 6, 1998
URL: http://www.hyperactivesw.com/HCStories/stories.html