I use HyperCard as a captioning program for my film. I'm a photographer and need to provide a detailed caption sheet to be shipped with my film to my agent in New York. I use Hypercard for this because it allows me to create a searchable stack as well as launch my Federal express software etc from within hypercard. I can then print or fax the caption sheet.
Comments to: Jim Kelly
How do I use HyperCard? To do work. To save time. To conjure up a little fun. I teach children and teachers how to use computers. As part of my job, I run a network in an elementary school. HyperCard is my mainstay. The integration of HyperCard and Applescript allows me to remotely controls my network of Macs, setting the system volume, monitor bitdepth, restarting, shutting down, etc., all on the fly. I use HyperCard to keep an inventory of hardware and software. I also use the combination of HyperCard, AppleScript, and the scriptable macro program "Keyquencer" to automate the input of student records, saving countless teacher work hours that can now be devoted to children. I take special pride in the help I gave to another teacher that allowed him to create a sound-generating HyperCard stack for a quadriplegic student. The student was enabled to participate in his school orchestra by "playing" the stack. Keep in mind that when I started with HyperCard, I had no programming experience whatsoever. My "affair" with HyperCard began when I made a simple children's game, "The Haunted House". The game has generated shareware fees and eMails from around the world. While making "The Haunted House", I discovered that HyperCard was extensible through the use of code resources called XCMDs and XFCNs. Since I couldn't find XCMDs to provide certain features that I wanted, I set about learning how to write them myself. To my surprise, some of the XCMDs I wrote proved to be useful to others. One in particular, "ColorCover", has been used in hundreds of commercial, shareware, and freeware projects. My licensees include names such as Knowledge Adventure and the NASA Classroom of Tomorrow. None of this would have happened if it weren't for HyperCard. If I had been told that in order to begin programming I had to start with Visual Basic or C++, I would never have taken that first step. As a teacher, I know that few topics are as "hot" as computer education. In the next decade, the schools will introduce millions of children to computers. The schools will be providing many of these children with their first experience in programming. Will the introduction that tomorrow's programmers receive come in the form of HyperTalk on a Mac? It's all up to Apple...
Comments to: Mark Klink
After ten years in animation, I had a fine arts job - working with a documentary director who was planning her first dramatic movie. Her husband was a technology buff who'd developed a storyboard/video system while working on Rumblefish. He liked Macs. He liked HyperCard. Apple sent us computers, Apple sent us evangelists, we beta tested software, we had demos of wonderful prototypes - many made in HyperCard, and had MIT boys visiting us every week, breathing down my neck as I tried to work. I worked for a couple of months with a HyperCard author who'd made a wonderful storyboarding system which worked with HyperScan and the first Farallon sound recording software. It was great. I would tell him what would work for us, and he would sit there and make it IN FRONT OF MY EYES! He'd open a script and say "later on when you figure this out, you can do..." and then he would make my Mac do some amazing thing. I was awed. I was also pregnant. After my baby was born, I spent a long months too exhausted to do much of anything. But my Plus sat there waiting for me. By this time, I think a 11cx was the "hot" machine. We couldn't afford a new computer - we couldn't afford a new BOOK to explain the computer we had. But I had a copy of HyperCard and I had Danny Goodman's HyperCard Handbook. Since I couldn't afford software it dawned on me I had the means to write my own and I proceeded to do every "you do it" in Danny Goodman's book. So while my baby napped, I learned to script. The biggest thrill was the day I decided that I wanted to change every phone number in my address stack to have a 1 in front of the area code. I wrote something and just sat there amazed watching it go. I also discovered the internet. We had tinkered around with some 300 baud modem and a terminal emulation program on our PC but decided it was worthless. Then my husband came home with a 1200k modem. It felt like the concorde. It worked on the Mac with Compuserve and... I discovered a HyperCard community. Along with that community, I discovered that the attitude of the first author I'd worked with was the rule, not the exception. I gained teachers who showed me how to do things the right way, and examined and helped correct every horrible script mess I'd wrapped myself up in. I was very fortunate - it was like a wonderful gentle grad school without the tuition. I made a little bit of shareware in HyperCard, but most important were the skills I learned from people willing to share information. I've gone on to do commercial multimedia work and web development, but the community I gained with HyperCard is an important part of my daily life. I've developed professional relationships with many other HyperCard developers. One of the neatest things I worked on was software which wrote html using Speech Recognition via Applescript and HyperCard. (I did color coding and palettes for it.) I script in HyperCard to test visual ideas, and to rough out interactive sequences rapidly. I use HyperCard to control my Quicktime animations and I am writing a game with my daughter. In addition to writing with HyperCard, I *use* HyperCard on a constant basis. Every day I use a stack my co-worker wrote which automates writing html to display artwork - I aim the stack at a folder and it makes a page for me, and there are a lot of other HyperCard utilities I couldn't live without. In the context of my work as a HyperCard Forum volunteer on AOL, I use software which checks uploaded stacks for compliance with AOL's TOS guidelines. HyperCard is great stuff!
Comments to: Catherine Kunicki
A complete encyclopedia of electricity usage end technology could be a reality. I used HyperCard because it is easy to program, and schematics in black and white are adequate. By using PICT files when and where I need to show reality, I can add a picture of the real machine. Adding movies is the next step. I also use HyperCard to program multiple choice quizes that are self-correcting. As HyperCard's popularity grows, I plan to help others enjoy using it. By the way, all my work is in French because I was a university teacher for the last 38 years. I am retired but not inactive.
Comments to: Adrien Leroux
I started using Hypercard because a friend told me: "It's the best tool to have your work organized exactly as you want it!" The Macintosh is already very flexible, but Hypercard adds a much higher level of flexibility. Hypercard is "SuperMac". My work is very much oriented towards storing and retrieving notes, information, or creating small tables to correlate data, etc. I also use hypercard to keep web bookmarks, telephone numbers, etc. A telephone example will show you how flexible Hypercard is: I use a stack (call it a window if you prefer) where the left part shows a list of domains (e.g.: "local shops", "national administrations", " family", "friends", etc.) Clicking on a line of this list makes the right part of the stack show a scrolling field of type "text" where you can type any information, in the form you like. To be recognized as a phone number, a string should be prefixed by "t" and one or more spaces, and be underlined (a style called "group"). The phone numbers are at any place in the text; clicking on a phone number triggers the modem which dials the number. This way I can add any comment I wish for a phone number, such as "manager: Mr X", "opening hours: 9-19", etc. and modify it at any time, including while I phone (e.g. "Mr X will be away until June 25"). Similar principles apply to my "Bookmarks" stack. I also have a "Hypercard tricks" stack, and many professional and personal stacks where I add buttons,fields, etc. to perform tasks I need: creating an index of the words of a text, taking out carriage returns, etc. My future freeware "Cardtext" will be along these lines; you can have a look to its general orientations at http://www.bigfoot.com/~philippe.lestang/
Comments to: Philippe Lestang
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Revised: November 6, 1998
URL: http://www.hyperactivesw.com/HCStories/stories.html