Hi Barry,
As a long-time (6+ years) user of Toolbook who is now using MetaCard, I thought that I
would give you some idea about what to expect from MetaCard. BTW, I have been using
MetaCard for about 7 months and would never go back to Toolbook.
First, a few things that caused me some initial headaches...
The most obvious thing you will notice is that the IDE for MetaCard is much less
mature than Toolbook's. To be honest, it took me a couple of weeks before I felt
comfortable with how things worked. I'm used to it now, and have found some things
about how it works that I prefer over Toolbook, but the transition was difficult.
While Asymetrix has focused on creating new, more powerful dialogs and wizards in
their IDE, MetaCard folks have focused more on building the capabilities of the
language itself. When was the last time that Asymetrix came out with any kind of
extended capabilities for OpenScript? I think it was TB4 (several years ago).
The second major problem for me was the way the Debugger in MC works. It's much
different than Toolbook, and less robust.
Finally, the help system in MetaCard can't hold a candle to Toolbook's. Give it to
Asymetrix folks, they really did a great job on their help file. The MetaCard help is
in a different format and isn't comprehensive.
That's it for my gripes. In almost every other way, MetaCard is superior to Toolbook.
The scripting language (MetaTalk) in MC is very similar to OpenScript, you will not
have much trouble making the conversion. MetaTalk, however, is much more powerful than
OpenScript. In some cases, I've found that just a couple of MetaTalk lines of code
suffice to do what Toolbook would need 8-10 to do. Plus there are all kinds of
functions that Toolbook never thought about providing. For example, MetaCard has a
screenLoc() function that returns (in pixels! not TB page units - which I hate!) the
point that defines the center of the screen. How many lines of OpenScript code would
it take to do that one? And then there's screenDepth(), screenRect(), platform(),
machine(), environment(), lookAndFeel()...and that's just the beginning.
For delivery, MetaCard apps can be compiled into a singe EXE file that includes the
MetaCard Engine, where with Toolbook you have to distribute the 18+ separate files
that make up Toolbook's distributable runtime engine.
Making a cross-platform app is done by essentially compiling with the machine-specific
engine. We develop on Windows, then build a Mac version on our Mac. We learned that
there are some differences in how the different engines work, but nothing serious that
we couldn't work around. We've never tried to create an app that runs on UNIX.
Lastly, MetaCard is much snappier than Toolbook. My MetaCard apps load 5-10 times
faster than the *same* Toolbook app. Files are smaller, performance is much better.
Like I said, we have been very pleased since we switched to MC as our main development
environment and would recommend all Toolbook developers take a serious look at
MetaCard.
Hope this perspective is useful.
--Leston
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Barry Boepple ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Subject: Metacard Vs. ToolBook
Greetings,
Currently I use ToolBook 6.5 for CBT development. There is a general sense
of discontent among many ToolBook users related to it's web capabilities and
the direction Asymetrix (Click2Learn) is taking. Our list serve has a lot of
activity on it and recently a thread about Metacard appeared. I think there
are a few other ToolBookers monitoring your list now to see what all of you
have to say about Metacard.
I am interested in learning more about Metacard's Internet capabilities.
What kind of real world experience all of you are having with it? There is
so much hype these days regarding many products capabilities, but often in a
real world setting, things are not as peachy as the hype would have it be.
Would any of you be willing to elaborate on web based projects as far as the
pros and cons of Metacard for such projects? I am interested in knowing such
things as:
-Does your scripting language get converted to Java or some other native
language that will run in current browsers?
-Is the Metacard company responsive to your concerns and requests?
-How stable is Metacard in the development mode?
-Does it have a large overhead for CD distribution?
-Is converting from PC to Mac, UNIX etc...reliable and easy?
I hope this is not an inappropriate request, but who better to ask than the
people actually using the product in the field.
Thanks
Barry Boepple
SUMMETRIC Interactive Software, Inc.
http://www.summetric.com
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Leston Drake
LetterPress Software, Inc.
http://www.lpsoftware.com
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