Table of Contents

• Introduction

• General Guidelines

• Pre-Import

• Post-Import

• The Title Card

• The About Card

• The Records Cards

• The Tips Card

• The Timer Cards

• About Revolution Menus

• Adding a Menu Bar

• Editing the Stack Script

• Color Guidelines

• Optimizing - Timed Events

• Optimizing - About Box Substack

• Optimizing - Index Palette

• Other Revolution Features

Introduction

For years, Apple Computer's HyperCard has been the authoring environment of choice for thousands of Macintosh users. Its ease of use and accessible scripting language have made programmers out of many people who would never have attempted to write software in more complex languages. Unfortunately, HyperCard has been neglected by Apple in recent years, and as the Macintosh makes advances in its interface and feature set, perfectly functional stacks may be perceived as outdated. In addition, many stack authors have gazed wistfully at the majority of computer usage in the world and wished they could port their work to run on Windows or UNIX machines. Until recently there was no alternative for these authors, outside of rewriting their work from scratch in another programming language.

MetaCard and Revolution are cross-platform authoring solutions that read and convert HyperCard stacks, allowing stack authors to port their work to Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP, Macintosh 68K/PPC/OSX, and many different varieties of UNIX. A stack written in MetaCard or Revolution will run without any alteration on all of these platforms, provided the target computer has the freely-available engine installed or the stack is compiled as a platform-specific stand-alone application. A HyperCard stack needs to be imported and converted only once. After that, it will run on any OS without further changes.

MetaCard and Revolution are cousins, both using the MetaCard engine to power their software. Revolution, however, has a more modern interface and offers a wider variety of custom scripting libraries than MetaCard does, such as custom printing features, geometry management, and more. Its palettes and menus have been redesigned with the modern computer user in mind. Because both products use the same engine and file format, stacks created on one can be opened and edited on the other. This tutorial has been specifically created for Revolution users. If you are using MetaCard to port your HyperCard stacks, see the MetaCard version of this tutorial instead.

Revolution supports almost all HyperCard commands and features, and the very few things not directly supported can be scripted or added with XCMDs (on Macs) or DLLs (on Windows.) In addition, because Revolution uses a large superset of HyperCard's scripting language, Revolution offers many times the power and capability of HyperCard. Nearly all of the behaviors that require XCMDs in HyperCard are implemented as native features in Revolution. Revolution stack authors will find that external additions are almost never necessary. In the years that HyperActive Software has been doing HyperCard conversions, we have never required an XCMD.

Converting a HyperCard stack to Revolution is not difficult, but does require some knowledge about the differences between the two software programs. The goal of this tutorial is to expose stack authors to some of those differences, explain some possible approaches for successful conversion, and walk the user through the conversion of a simple HyperCard stack as an example.

Not all conversion issues are addressed in this tutorial, but it does focus on the most common ones. The objective is to give the new Revolution user a basic understanding that will serve as a foundation for conversions of other, more complex stacks.

Using the Revolution Starter Kit

What you will need: software and download information

• HyperCard 2.2 or higher (commercial software from Apple Computer, Inc.)

• Revolution version 1.1.1 or higher, or the free Revolution trial package

• The Tech Support TimeSaver HyperCard stack

Downloading the software

http://www.hyperactivesw.com/mctutorial/tutFiles/TSTS-HC.sit.

That is all you will need if you already own the full commercial development version of Revolution. If you plan to use the free trial version instead, download:

Revolution 30-day Trial