>I am a doctoral student in law in France. I already have a US law degree.
>I know C, HyperTalk, basic, and some (very little) assembler.
Hi,
pity that we recently decided on making the code PD -- now we finally have
someone who could create a good license ... Anyway, maybe you could come up
with a few lines of legal mumbo-jumbo which everyone has to agree to
before he submits his sources to us. We need it to keep us out of trouble
if someone sends us code and asks money for it and we implement it the same
way, and we also need it to make sure nobody suddenly pulls back the part
of the sources (s)he wrote. That is, we need to ensure only free sources
are submitted, and submitted sources stay available. If you could do that,
a thing that's been troubling me for long would be solved.
We would also need help on how to protect the "official distribution". In
short, we intend to distribute the sources for free and allow everybody to
create his/her own OpenCard, but under another name (BTW - OpenCard is a
working name, when we have the product finished we'll go and decide on a
final name). This way we want to make sure that there's at least one
reliable and stable version out there.
>I would really like to help, as I am a bit of a fanatic
>about HC.
You've found a group of like minds. And there are also many of us who
actually *use* HC for their things and need a new HC. I think this is one
of the better combinations for a group.
>Im sorry I've not read all the prior postings - there are
>litterally thousands.
There's no harm done in asking -- at least the list won't look as dead, as
many folks are pretty busy right now. I myself only just found the time to
get back to working on the file format.
>Oh, I speak french and german. I want to help.
Well, I speak French and German, too ... but I lack the ability to do the
former in a way that people understand me ;-)
On what else you could do (but I wouldn't mind if you could do the law
stuff, as you're the only one able here), well we still need someone for
the User Interface stuff. That is, we currently have Anthony working on the
interpreter for the scripting language, and I am tapping away to get the
file format into a state that it runs at better speed.
So, we'd need someone to get the non-programmers into lengthy discussions
about how to do the editor, what button styles we'll need etc. Our first
and foremost goal is of course getting something that does everything HC
2.4 does out the door (excluding bugs and things like 32k field text
limit), so don't get too high on the featurism. But I wouldn't mind if you
carefully tried upgrading HC's editing interface. It should still look
similar so we don't have to re-learn (I'm as lazy as every other
programmer, probably moreso), but it should get rid of most modal dialogs,
maybe implement them as palettes. And it should be done in a way that it
can also be implemented under Unix or Windows.
We'd also need a >32k text editor that is implemented thus that it can
easily be ported to other platforms (that is, wrappers to QuickDraw calls,
GrafPorts etc.).
BTW - do you have any experiences with other platforms besides the Mac?
I hope I didn't scare you away. This is just a list of everything that
still needs to be done. Pick your favorite one and ask any questions you
might have about anything.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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