Aloha to all: Thanks to Richard Gaskin for "pointing the way" to MC and to the "extreme" patience of Scott. . .we are moving from alpha to beta now with a "baby Metacard Site" up on the Himalayan Academy web site, as yet, unpublished. Go to: http://www.himalayanacademy.com/studyhall/ It consists of two web pages, two "delivery stacks" and two educational component stacks. All "freeware". The first "key" stack is a tiny "portal' that downloads a cirriculum stack which then gives you options to choose "study components." of which there are now only two. These four being the skeleton of a structure we will build on. The "paradigm" here is to try to make MC as "easy as any other plug in" for the lay user who has no interest in scripting. Nothing gets saved to disk ( at least now) except the engine and the key stack. For newbies you will find a useful suite of simple tools all ready to go and easily adapted: downloading images, posting forms-to-mail to a CGI, invoking user's browser and their email client etc. The color meditation stack has an interesting use of images stored in a hidden stack and then dynamically resized and used over many instances in the main stack as button icons. We are setting up beta testers in 9 different countries: India, Malaysia, Singapore, Braxil, Ukraine, Mauritius, USA and Canada and Australia. While veteran MC "wizards" will find nothing remarkable in the stacks in terms of scripting, I would appreciate your most "scathing scrutiny/criticism" from the "grand masters" of the user interface. Once we "go public" our presentation here will potentially introduce Metacard to a vast new audience (and to some extent a market for the full developer kit) that has never heard of it before, as such the first impression of this new technology will be formed in the minds of many people by what I have done here and I am really new at this and may have made some huge blunder I can't see. We are not in a hurry, we want this to be right. We would like the "front end" (the web page (s), the mode of delivering the engines to the users and the proper instructions for getting up and running and the tiny "portal" stack) of this thing to be as flowless, easy and bug free as possible, so that the perception will be that "Amazing, this is as easy as Netscape." So if you have time to examine those web pages and the first two "delivery" stacks and want to skip the component stacks that would be great. I have still to get the windows engine "all by itself," on line (now people have to download the whole trial version, which is less than ideal.) Outstanding questions are: 1) is "anystack.mc.sit.hqx" is an acceptable format for downloading a file for other platforms besides the MAC OS. 2) We are trying to avoid having to create any kind of installers. I have given instructions to put everything in a single directory. But if this is not necessary it would be good to not have to say that. i.e. and make it even simpler. . .but I am not sure how this works on other platforms beside a MAC where the issue of saving MC to one folder and saving the first stack to any other place is not important. If you have time to look and care to comment, please mail your comments off list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you! Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com. www.himalayanacademy.com www.gurudeva.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
