>I am a new subscriber who has been lurking for a while. I am trying to port
>my considerable HyperCard expertise to Director 8 and finding it a humbling
>process.
My first Director product was also my first cross-platform CD-ROM,
and I had two months to complete it. After eight years of programming
HyperCard, I wasn't humbled by Director, I was limited by it. There
were things that were so easy to do in HyperCard that couldn't
apparently be done in Director. I would ask my colleague how to do
something trivial, and he would say that Director couldn't do that,
and that I would have to deal with it. I chose not to believe it and
went ahead and found ways to do everything I needed to do. I even
managed to ship the CD-ROM on time.
That was with Director 4.04. With Director 7 & 8 things have become
more confusing because of dot syntax. You'll find a lot of people now
give their advice in dot syntax form. Don't be scared off by that,
most things can still be expressed in the older way, and the older
way was heavily inspired by HyperTalk. If you're trying to do
something, type exactly what you would have typed in HyperCard, and
there's a good chance it will work.
A couple of major differences between the two are that in HyperCard
you can have a background field that contains different text on each
screen (card in HC, frame in Director). Director can't do that (even
after 13 years of development), you have to use a different field for
each screen, or jump through hoops to simulate the same effect. In
Director's favor, it has lists. Lists are special variables, read
everything you can about them. It would be great if HyperTalk had
list variables.
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