On Thu, 16 Dec 1999 Rob Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My concern focuses on what the partnership is committed is to deliver to MC
> Corp. and whether we can reasonably expect whatever we accomplish in
> MetaTalk to be of value to Scott and others. I am concerned because I
> think it is possible that, by the time we get a basic foundation in place,
> the FreeCard interpreter will have progressed to the point that we can
> script the remainder in FreeScript. At that point do/can we abandon MT for
> FS and say, "Here's as far as we got, Scott."?
>
> What about it, Scott? Anthony, 1) are my estimates too optimistic
My personal opinion is that indeed your estimates *are* too
optimistic. Of course, given the leisurely pace of progress on the
licensing and organization issues to date, I could be wrong (so far,
progress on the interpreter and file system seems to be faster). But
I do know that you're not going to want to be working on the UI with
the FreeCard engine until it's nearly done: Constraining the design of
the UI based on what engine features have been implemented at any
given time will have a profound negative effect on the quality of the
final product.
But even if you do the last part of the UI development on the FreeCard
engine, MetaCard's participation wouldn't be a total loss. As long as
the FreeScript language is compatible with HyperTalk, it should be a
straightforward matter to use the resulting FreeCard development UI
with MetaCard, which is our primary interest.
> and 2)
> what will the UI group get as a starting point with the engine...an open
> window & a message box, plus a list of objects & properties and commands,
> operators, & syntax supported?
The message box just a stack in MetaCard, so really you don't even get
that as part of the engine. But I would think that you would use the
existing MetaCard UI as the development environment for the new one,
replacing components of it as you complete the equivalents. I would
expect a certain amount of "borrowing" of scripts to go on and we're
not going to be too picky about that (after all, we don't put any
restrictions on customers using parts of the standard UI in their
applications), but we certainly wouldn't expect the new UI to have any
visual or organizational resemblance to the existing standard
development environment. After the new UI is done and the FreeCard
engine about 90% done, you'd take on the job of porting it (though the
engine developers would probably want to test-port portions of it
prior to that as part of the engine unit-testing process).
Regards,
Scott
PS: I don't know who's advertising this list and where, but it seems
to be working: Membership has almost doubled (to 40, not counting the
digest readers) in the past couple of weeks.
> Rob Cozens, CCW
> http://www.serendipitysoftware.com/who.html
>
> "And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
> Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."
>
> from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631)
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
