> a) A dialog to manage the stacksInUse -- Similar to
>an open-stack dialog. Select a stack, as before. Click
>on the "start" or the "stop" button, according to
>whether the currently selected stack is in use or not.
Alain,
I like that.
> b) A dialog to view/modify the "Applications"
>
> c) A dialog to view/modify the "Documents"
>
> d) A dialog to view/modify the userLevel
wouldn't that essentially just replace the corresponding cards in the
"Home" stack? And what about the "Stacks" ?
> a) New button tasks
Certainly. That was what button tasks were intended for, anyway.
> b) New dialog to upload/download by FTP
Sounds cool, but what is the actual use? There already are specialized
applications like Fetch and Anarchie. Do you have any special features in
mind that are of advantage to FreeCard or HyperCard? E.g. providing some
sort of installer so people can download new stacks and GUI updates .. ?
> c) Improved scriptEditor
I suppose you have taken a look at MC's, SC's, AS's and RealBasic's script
editors? CompileIt also has a nice implementation of a B/W syntax coloring
scheme (basically just uses bold and italics).
What I am missing here is a menu bar editor. I think there is such a stack
on my web site. Maybe you could incorporate that?
>4. By and by, FreeGUI will be ported to MetaCard, and
>to FreeCard when it is released. But we need not
>preoccupy ourselves with these eventualities at this
>time.
Good thinking, this will calm down many of those who intend to help in
development, as they have the prospect of their work continuing but also
they don't need to worry about other languages.
> a) Web-savvy from A to Z
Again, make sure you don't include features you only need personally in a
way that doesn't allow others to remove them. HyperCard *can* be used for
everything, that much is true, but there are reasons where it shouldn't.
However, if you devise a clever plug-in scheme, users can easily remove
stuff they don't need or add their own.
> b) Collaboration tools
Same concerns, however if you keep them generic, this could go to great
lengths in helping in development of FreeUI.
> c) Integrated authoring system and artefacts
> -- think "Pantechnicon" ;-)
Script library and all that, I suppose? Have you thought about libraries
of buttons, cards etc. ? Readymade buttons is cool, but something more
readily available is often preferrable.
> d) Computer-assisted methodologies
> and development training
Could you elaborate?
> e) Adaptive agents to assist users/developers
These can be helpful, but keep in mind that assistants are often most
useful for initial setup of a program but prevent users from knowing how
they would do things without the assistant. This leads to people going
through the whole assistant again, probably messing up their setup when
they could just select a certain menu option and change the setting there.
They need to learn the easy way of doing something with the assistant *in
addition to* doing something the usual way. Thus, maybe an improved UI that
doesn't need assistants might be a better solution in that regard.
> 4. Toggle between freeGUI and HyperCard's native
>GUI with a functionKey
Will this be user-configurable? I have a keyboard without FKeys.
> 5. Some of the dialogs don't really do what they are
>supposed to. ex: iconEditor, patternEditor ... the
>thumbnails of recentCards are bogus ...
Do you know about copying a card and then typing Cmd-Shift-V to insert it?
That gives you an accurate thumbnail.
> d) read/write of text-files will be replaced by a
>real file-format (Uli's)
I'll have some real time on my hands again in about a week, I hope to get
XStackFile and the XBF external into a useful state for you then.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
The future of programming: http://freecard.sourceforge.net
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