Re: Ok, what now?
I've just downloaded the MetaCard starter kit, and had a bit of a look at the demo, and quite frankly it impressed the hell out of me. What I'd like now is a few ideas on how I might put this thing to good use. If anyone has any great ideas or tips on how make the most of MetaCard, please respond (on or off list as you prefer). As the others have pointed out, the xworlds.com collection is a great starting point. All the best MetaCarders out there have adde to it, including Andu, Tuviah, of course the Crossworlds gang, and many others. But like Phil Davis suggested, perhaps the most important thing is to just play with it. Go wild -- I've found little I can't do with MetaCard. I suspect you'll find the same as well. And as with any tool, there will be times when you want to kick it in the shins -- but if your experience is like most folks', you'll discover that more often than not it's more a question of understanding the tool than any inherent limitation in the tool itself. The best thing is that you've already discovered the most valuable MetaCard resource: this list. Happy scripting! -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: carbonized MetaCard
But you should keep in mind that the final release of Mac OS X is many, many months away and while it might make a good development platform before then, there probably won't be a large enough installed base to bother with making distributions for that platform until sometime next year. Gee, Scott, you don't think an OS which requires a proprietary language to write native apps for and only runs on the most expensive machines in the industry isn't going to take over the world? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Which is faster?
David Bovill wrote: Anyone know whether it is faster to get text information from a field, a custom property or returning the result directly from a function... To determine the fastest of two possible solutions, you might consider using our freeware MetaBench tool: ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/MetaCard/4W_MetaBench.mc.sit.hqx -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Metacard Macro?
Have you considered using a frontScript and log messages to a file before passing them? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Spherical Photos
Sivakatirswami wrote: Is there any way to "drive" spherical photos inside Metacard? The software we are using stiches together digital pictures taken at roughly 120 degrees each from the center where the camera is located, capturing everything from the zenith to the ground. This digital 360 degree "surround image (makes you feel like you are inside a globe) can then be viewed by rotating, zooming in and out to any point. It's pretty incredible. We have some from the recent United Nations Millenium Peace Summit from inside the United Nations General Assembly hall where our team was and we would like to be able to present these from within Metacard. Right now the only option is via a browser with some plug ins. QuickTime VR plays great in MC. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
card field vs. field for imported stacks
I was helping a newcomer with a scripting problem, and I found what seems to be an anomaly in MC's behavior: He has a script which read: put tMyValue into fld "Start" It generated an error, "Object not found" (actually the error reported was "Parent not found", which is less clear, but we've come to learn that this usually means the specified object, not its parent). Since I was able to guess that this stack was imported from HyperCard, I tried a hunch which worked: I recreated the stack as a native MetaCard file, and it works just fine. Going back to the HyperCard-imported version, I had to change the script to specify the layer in order for it to work: put tMyValue into card fld "Start" Normally MC doesn't care whether an object is in a group or not, and will figure these things out well on its own. Why would it matter if the stack was imported from HyperCard? Is there another factor at play as well that I may be overlooking? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: card field vs. field for imported stacks
Scott Raney wrote: There is a stack property, hcAddressing, that governs whether you have to specify "card field" (and "bg button") as is required in HyperCard. It defaults to be true for imported HyperCard stacks, but you can set it back to false (the default for MetaCard stacks) if you're sure that none of the scripts refer to fields or buttons by number and you don't have any cases where card and background fields have the same name. Way cool -- another best-of-both-worlds solution. Thank you, Scott. Stellar answer. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: When to save a stack...
How can you tell when you have made changes to the stack in memory and therefore need to save it when it is closed. Do you have to tracke every change? The save command seems to save even when you have done nothing - right. Can you do something fancy like an MD5digest of the stack in memory??? The issue is that it takes a long time to save a database stack as it gets large, and I don't want to loose data. What's the best strategy? You could put a frontScript which traps for data-changing messages (closeField, resizeControl, etc.), and simply sets a global. When you save, you just clear that global and you're done. On closeStackRequest, you can check the value of this global to determine if the stack needs saving. Alternatively, if you have multiple documents in your setup you might want to use a custom stack property instead of a global. To prevent data loss, you could use MC's timers to create a routine which periodically saves every few minutes. I'm building this into an app now at the request of some customers, and it's pretty straightforward. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Sorting a List Field with Many Columns
Gregory Lypny wrote: I've got a list field with tab-separated strings on each line, which, in effect, creates the illusion of columns. When the field is shown, I'd like users to be able to sort it using any column "title" as the sort key (e.g., sort by column 1, column 2, and so on). What's the best way to handle this given that the string in each column is not one word? Assuming you make a user property for each of the heading buttons which corresponds to its column number, you could do this: put the uColumnNumber of the target into tColNum set the itemdel to tab sort by lines of fld "Whatever" by item tColNum of each -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Interface Challenge
I have a tough design problem for MC: I have two stacks, one displaying text which the user can select, and another containing a list field of options which can be applied to that text. Problem: When I click in the list field of the palette, the text selection in the field on the main window goes away. Solution: Darned if I know. I've tried all manner of kludgy workarounds, to no avail. I've tried various means of storing my own faux "selection" by changing the background color, but alas the background color doesn't affect the same region as a selection, so the effect is lost. And keep tracking of a faux selection is not a straightforward task. ;) Any other nifty solutions? After examining all sorts of other options, we're very committed to using a palette window for this, as opposed to a menu item. Unfortunately, all window types in MC exhibit this de-selection behavior. Ideally, list selections would never affect a selection in an open text field. SuperCard used to act like MC does, but somewhere along the line (v.1.7?) it was changed to make lists and buttons have no effect on text selection. Could MC be made to follow suit? Any options 'till then? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Interface Challenge
Dave Cragg wrote: In the list field in the palette, try setting the traversalOn and autoHilite properties to false. You'll then have to script the hiliting of the field, something like: on mouseUp set the hilitedLines of me to word 2 of the clickLine end mouseUp This should keep the selection in the toplevel stack. Thanks for the suggestion, Dave. That would be good for indivudual lines, but we need to allow selection of arbitrary chunks of text. For the moment I'm going with the backgroundColor; while it looks less than ideal, what it does for the workflow in this app is worth the aesthetic downside. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Interface Challenge
Scott Rossi wrote: Problem: When I click in the list field of the palette, the text selection in the field on the main window goes away. I actually mentioned this same problem months ago. I was trying to effect changes on text using a combobox and ran into the same deselection problem. This is a really lame workaround, but did you try capturing the path/location of the selected text and then reselecting the text when you affect it? I was going to try this option but never got around to it. We tried that in the past, but alas this means a lot of flashing selection regions. :( If you haven't worked with the backgroundColor property before, it's a fair second choice. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: MC, the Web, and you
Thanks for the feedback, Andu:
A quick survey of MetaCard developers, if you don't mind:
...
But what do you need this for if I may ask?
I'm seeing a big shift away from desktop applications and onto the Web, and
wanted to get a feel for what others are doing with MC.
It seems that the three main ways MC can contribute to Web work are:
- CGI solutions
- Net-aware applications ("custom browsers")
- Web production tools
Historically, most of our work with MC has been designing desktop
applications, but in recent months the bulk of the work coming in has us
using JavaScript or Flash (or in the case of Flash 5, both together).
Since most ISPs only allow Perl-based CGIs, we're finding ourselves spending
less time with MetaCard than I would prefer. I'm working with my favorite
client on adding some net-savvy to his app, but I'd like to be working in MC
even more. JavaScript and Perl simply aren't as much fun. :)
So the biggest reason for finding out what others are doing with MC is
twofold:
- What are the opportunities for a RAD tool like MC in
a Browser-centric world?
- What untapped opportunities may still exist in the
world of desktop applications?
The breadth of what MetaCard delivers also makes it relatively difficult to
define. We can build almost anything for a client, but more and more they
seem to prefer that it take place inside of a browser window.
Given the relative newness of this Web fenzy, I suspect that the browser
will ultimately prove to be a transitional phase, a stepping stone on the
way to other things which allow more flexible user interfaces for both
content presentation (which is currently good on the Web) and data
manipulation (at which the Web sucks -- can you imagine using a
browser-based spreadsheet?).
There are probably several dozen categories of things MetaCard can do that
would really drive its value home to a variety of organizations. SETI and
Napster are two popular examples of distributed apps which conceivably could
have been written in MetaCard, and I suspect there are a few thousand more
waiting to be discovered.
A question in response to your post: Since you mentioned being able to
spend 95% of your time with MC and that most of your work is for the Web,
does that imply that you're building server-side MC CGIs? Or "custom
browsers" a la AOL?
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
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Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716
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MC, the Web, and you
A quick survey of MetaCard developers, if you don't mind: Of work you've performed over the last year, what percentage has been related to the Web? Does your work focus more on the client side of the Web, the server side, or both? Of the time spent with your tools on a project, what percentage do you spend with MetaCard? And what percentage with client-side tools/languages like JavaScript, Perl, and of course HTML and others? Thanks in advance - -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Goodbye
Steven D'Aprano wrote: But the time has come that I have to make a decision, and sadly as an amateur programmer the price of Metacard is way beyond my budget. It is three times as expensive as Visual Basic, and while you can easily argue that MC is more than three times as good as VB, the reality is that this does *not* translate into three times as many sales. C++ development environments are even cheaper; many are completely free. With software development, the cost of the IDE should be the smallest factor in the equation. If it's not, you're not writing much code. ;) Visual Basic is a good time for what it does, but it only does Windows. While Windows is currently the biggest player, it is the only family of operating systems with a declining market share. But even if the large majority that Windows represents was the only market you were interested in, unless you're tying into Access databases or taking advantage of other Microsoft-specific technologies, most work can be done much more quickly in MC than in VB. Even if a programmer values his time at minimum wage, the cost difference pays for itself in a few weeks at most. And of course, with VB you say adios to Mac OS and Linux, or anything else not owned by Microsoft. So I'd like to wish everyone great success, and hope that starting next month Metacard Corp, like Microsoft have, and Delphi and Borland before them, will see the wisdom in capturing the home/small business market and use that as a foothold in gaining the lions share of the software development market. Most of us are small SOHOs. MetaCard is among the more expensive tools I've purchased, but hands down it has provided the highest return on investment over anything we've ever purchased. As with any business expense, it's return on investment, not initial purchase price, which is the primary determinant of profitability. VB should be a good ride, but over time I suspect you'll miss MC's property and message inheritance. Maybe we'll see you back in a few months? Hope so. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Metacard based browser?
David Bovill at wrote: Is anyone working on a Metacard based browser? I'm just starting on that trail, and either I am making some basic mistakes, or it is more complex than I thought (as ever). What would be the advantages of a MetaCard-based browser over MSIE or NN? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Metacard based browser?
Scott Rossi wrote: My guess is, if you're looking to be able to parse the HTML from any existing Web page, you're in for a thousand and one headaches. One word: tables. Okay, two words: nested tables. ;) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Metacard vs Flash
Sivakatirswami at wrote: If someone started debating the concept of using MC with "Why don't you just do that in Flash" i.e. pushing Flash as a primary development environment over MetaCard, what would be ten reasons you would give in response? I tried Flash once (before Flash 4.0 came out) and it felt like someone had "hog tied me" compared to the ease of working in XTalk and we decided not to bother learning it. It seemed to me to be a useful animation program, if you wanted to spend all that time and money to make people dizzy when they opened their web page (just joking, I'm sure it has mature uses), but beyond that too constrained an environment to build anything robust with any ease. But I would like some points from the sages on this list to take to the table. Thanks. Flash 5 is the ideal environment for browser-based applications. MetaCard is the ideal environment for cross-platform desktop applications. Flash doesn't do traditional UI design. MetaCard doesn't do browsers. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
MetaCard hosting
Does anyone offer CGI access to MetaCard on a UNIX box? I'm half-tempted to get a server in here, even on my lamo DSL, just to enjoy the flexibility of using MC for CGI access. If there's an existing solution it would save me a lot of time. TIA - -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Merge function-- Quotes inside Quotes
Sivakatirswami at wrote:
Supercard has a "merge" function that causes quotes to be inserted when a `
char ( the tilde key on a mac) is entered in a quoted literal. This is an
extremely useful function for using xTalk to generate HTML. As I am planning
to convert several SuperCard web page generator engines over to MC, I am
"praying" there is something similar in Metatalk to do the same thing so
that we can eliminate the process of writing:
quote in strings like:
quote "http://www.findHeavenWithinYourSelf.com/" "someFile.html"
quote"
The quote char wasn't in the special char list of escapables. And
put "\"whatever\"" into msg
didn't work
I use a simple function for this:
put q("http://www.findHeavenWithinYourSelf.com/") into tMyVar
function q s
return quote s quote
end q
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
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Re: Preferences--Where to Locate
Sivakatirswami at wrote: For all the difficulty and cross platform issues I think I will need, given my skill level, to stick with writing preferences to a data folder in the directory containing the engine. Many mainstream applications do employ this strategy. The cool thing is that the oddball OS, Mac, seems to be migrating this way. with "packages", introduces in OS 9 and playing a big role in OS X, I would expect this approach to become more common. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: System font
Jacqueline Landman Gay at wrote: Is there a way to detect the system's menu font on the machine running MetaCard? On Mac, that could be Chicago, Charcoal, or several others. On Windows, probably MS Sans Serif. Set the font to 0 (zero) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: System font
Geoff Canyon at wrote: Is there a way to detect the system's menu font on the machine running MetaCard? On Mac, that could be Chicago, Charcoal, or several others. On Windows, probably MS Sans Serif. Set the font to 0 (zero) MetaCard took 0, but seemed to do something strange with it. My system font (Charcoal) didn't display right. What exactly happened? Could it be an anti-aliasing issue? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: System font
Jacqueline Landman Gay at wrote: Is there a way to detect the system's menu font on the machine running MetaCard? On Mac, that could be Chicago, Charcoal, or several others. On Windows, probably MS Sans Serif. Set the font to 0 (zero) Aha!! Whee! Thanks. :) Does this work on Windows too? Seems to. Since I got the G4 I've been doing more work on my Mac (helps that I upgraded that monitor as well -- need lotsa space for all those palettes g), and I've found that at least setting the property there gets fonts mapped correctly for Windows as well. Since the 0 is not documented (is it?), I'm only guessing that it's reliable; seems to work well here on both platforms. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: message order
On 7/1/00 12:05 PM, Jacqueline Landman Gay at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is the message order for a normal double-click event on an object? mouseDown mouseUp mouseDoubleDown mouseDoubleUp Oof. This is way different than HyperCard, and considerably pared down. Thanks. It makes me wonder how some of the other message clusters are different. It's not that much different: If HyperCard supplied messages for double-click events (does it these days?), it would probably work very similarly. The mouseStillDown message should not be sent if the mouse goes up within the double-click threshold (as defined by the user in the Mouse control panel), nor should mouseDown be sent twice if the second down even occurs within this interval. If HyperCard does not honor the double-click interval, I would report that as a bug. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: message order
On 7/1/00 12:05 PM, Jacqueline Landman Gay at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is the message order for a normal double-click event on an object? mouseDown mouseUp mouseDoubleDown mouseDoubleUp Oof. This is way different than HyperCard, and considerably pared down. Thanks. It makes me wonder how some of the other message clusters are different. It's not that much different: If HyperCard supplied messages for double-click events (does it these days?), it would probably work very similarly. The mouseStillDown message should not be sent if the mouse goes up within the double-click threshold (as defined by the user in the Mouse control panel), nor should mouseDown be sent twice if the second down even occurs within this interval. If HyperCard does not honor the double-click interval, I would report that as a bug. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Output to text (beginner question ;-))
I think it may be as simple as specifying what you want to open the file for, reading or writing. I think the default assumption is "read". open file myFile for text write If you need to write binary data (remember all those xcmds for HC to do this?) all you have to do is: open file myfile for binary write -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Food for thought...
On 6/25/00 2:22 AM, Geoff Canyon at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This opened up a larger open-source debate, prompting Glass to state that, "Open source will not be a dumping ground for dead products." When will this change take place? ;) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Hot Key with no windows displayed
An option has been proposed here in which messages captured by the backdrop would be processed. Mr. Raney -- what was the last word on that? It's on the feature-request list, but there's been no breakthrough on deciding how and where the messages would be delivered (i.e., what would be "the target" in this case?) and so development of this feature hasn't been scheduled yet. As stated in my last message to you: Things would have been a lot easier if the backdrop had been originally designed as an object, in which case you'd have been able to do things like: set the script of the backdrop to whatever set the backColor of the backdrop to "red" set the visible of the backdrop to true etc... Unfortunately the SC developers didn't think this far ahead, and this new architecture is fundamentally incompatible with the current syntax. I suppose in the long term it might be ideal to have the backdrop implemented as a true object, but I woldn't vote for spending any time on that unless it's absolutely necessary. Perhaps as a workaround we could allow backscripts to trap mouse activity in the backdrop, listing either "backdrop" or the backscript itself as the target. Would this work? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Mac registry...?
On 6/22/00 8:04 AM, Karl Becker at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Oh, that gets me wondering... does MetaCard have any way to do
separate preferences files for multiple users in OS 9 (and then, I'm
sure, OS X) ? Being able to support multiple users would be quite a
boon to people with MC applications ("OS 9 enhanced!") .
How about something like this:
specialFolder("Preferences") -- returns the path to the Prefs
folder on Mac OS
specialFolder("System") -- returns the path to the System
folder on Mac OS, and the Windows
folder on Windows
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
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Re: MetaCard as database
On 6/19/00 2:14 PM, Pierre Sahores at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To get a good speed in parsing a MC database of 25 000 records for 6.2 Mo of datas, i store the datas in a texte file loaded by the preopenstack script at once, as two vars (datas - 4.2 Mo and index - 2 Mo) and than divide the datas var in 25 subvars. To search the records to parse to the web or to a metacard front-end window, i use, first, "repeat for each line in var index + get offset" - seems faster than the filter command for multi-string searches on big vars - in the index var and, second, parse the datas stored in the right lines of the 25 datas subvars. If you find yourself doing a lot of benchmark comparisons of alternate algorithms, you might find this lil' tool useful: ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/MetaCard/4W_MetaBench.mc.sit.hqx -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Win32 and Large Fonts setting
When a user turns on the Large Font setting in Win32, MC-based layouts are at risk of not being able to adjust themselves appropriately. Phil Davis was kind enough to send me some Registry queries one can use to obtain current font metrics and then respond appropriately, but frankly the expense of having all UI elements dynamically resize themselves proportionate to the current font metrics is expensive and neither clients nor myself are excited about the possibility of spending that much development time on an item which will affect only a minority of users. How do you folks handle the dynamic font metrics of Windows? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: File selector-MacOS
On 6/14/00 1:00 AM, Dave Cragg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the problem with this (new) Navigation Services file selector on MacOS is that you can't select a folder like with the old one unless I'm missing something. Besides it has no live scrolling and really looks and acts like a visualBasic thing. I'd suggest defaulting to the old file/folder selector. Forward to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ;) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: File selector-MacOS
On 6/14/00 8:34 AM, andu at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know I should argue this with Apple but aside for not being able to resize it, I never found something wrong with the old one. Turning it into a complex application, seems to me, is just the old marketing trick of *creating* the need for more and more "features" and always at a price. My biggest complaint with the old one was that it was fully modal, and that it was not resizable. My only complains with Nav Services are the lack of live scrolling (geez, what year are they designing in?) and the really flakey response to the Enter key (it now differs from the Return key, in violation of their own guidelines on how default buttons work). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Easier Contextual Menus
There are two ways to make menus in MC: As a stack, or as a text list. Both can be used at the discretion of the developer for most cases, except woith contextual menus, where the developer must use a stack. It is this very case which is also the most challenging, since contextual menus, by their very nature, are always changing. It would be ultra cool of there was a way to call a function for contextual menus to let us use a text list instead, something like this: on mouseDown put "Item1,Item2,Item3" into tMenu get PopMenu(tMenu,the mouseLoc) DoSeomthingWith it end mouseDown Anyone else think this sort of enhancement would be useful? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Easier Contextual Menus
There are two ways to make menus in MC: As a stack, or as a text list. Both can be used at the discretion of the developer for most cases, except woith contextual menus, where the developer must use a stack. It is this very case which is also the most challenging, since contextual menus, by their very nature, are always changing. It would be ultra cool of there was a way to call a function for contextual menus to let us use a text list instead, something like this: on mouseDown put "Item1,Item2,Item3" into tMenu get PopMenu(tMenu,the mouseLoc) DoSeomthingWith it end mouseDown Anyone else think this sort of enhancement would be useful? Yes. Of course, you can write a script that creates a panel menu stack on the fly, but it this would make a cool built-in feature. They'd have to figure out where the menuPick handler would get sent though - to the object that contained the command to create the menu, or to the current card? Another reason for proposing a function -- no messages needed. I believe that for contextual menus a function makes the most sense for the scripter, and is the easiest for MetaCard Corp. to implement. Can we squeeze this into 2.3.1b3? :) Think of the collective hundreds of hours it would save us, and how cool our MC-based apps would look. With a function like this, one could store the contents of the menu in a property on the target: get popup(the uContextualNames of the target) We would have the greatest flexibility using mostly built-in stuff, with the addition of this one function. Can we have it Scott, huh, can we? Please? :) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Slicing and dicing tabular data
I have a sticky problem, and maybe one of you has a cool solution:
One of the apps I'm working on presents lists of tabular data, which may
have as many as a couple thousand rows and potentially dozens of columns.
I need to be able to display these quickly, as well as sort them, and to
extract a subset of rows for display.
I've tried multiple fields, which gives us the best look (very
spreadsheet-like), but even with MC's much-improved field manipulation doing
the ol' "put item j of line i into line i of fld j" takes far too long on
large data sets (using "repeat with..." helps, but not enough).
And of course, using MC's built-in tabs doesn't work well for this, since
adjusting the tabs can push adjacent columns off in a line where the sgtring
length exceeds the tabstop for that column.
The ideal solution would be to have a true multi-column list object, but
we'll have to wait for that. In the meantime, it occurs to be that there
may be another way around this:
Is there a quick way to break a large set of tabular data into columns?
It's really easy to get all the columns of a particular row ("get line
200"), but is there some way to effectively turn this on it's side, to
effectively say something like "get column 3"?
If I could quickly break the data into columns for display, then I only have
one "put" for each field, which would be satisfyingly quick. And I could
still sort rows in the master set, spliting them into columns each time I
need to display. Sweet.
Any suggestions?
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716
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slicing and dicing, cont.
As soon as I hit "send" on the last message, it occured to me that I should be able to get a big performance boost from breaking the text into an array first, and then dumping each array element into a field, like this: on mouseUp put the ticks into t1 lock screen set cursor to watch put fld "ssData" into tData set the itemDel to tab put 0 into tCnt put empty into tMyArray repeat for each line tLine in tData add 1 to tCnt repeat with i = 2 to the number of flds of grp "ssFields" put item i of tLine into line tCnt of tMyArray[i] end repeat end repeat repeat with i = 2 to the number of flds of grp "ssFields" put tMyArray[i] into fld i of grp "ssFields" end repeat put the ticks - t1 end mouseUp This lil' test cut time down significantly, from 480 ticks to 70. Any faster way? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: MetaCard 2.3.1 beta 2
On 6/2/00 1:43 PM, Leston Drake at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can do, though of course it'd be better to change those stackFiles properties so your app is not so dependent on a particular system setup... It is being dynamically set on startup, so it always works. Thanks for the change! Another round of kudos for Scott Raney! Not only the best support in the industry, but probably the most responsive to feature requests as well. Thank you, Scott. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Save file dialog info
On 6/1/00 10:08 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As long as you're writing it down, there *is* an easier (and faster) way: if char -4 to -1 of tFileName is not ".txt" then Ah, the power and glory of MetaTalk. Thanks for the reminder of these useful extensions to xTalk. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: MetaCard Plugin?
On 5/31/00 8:16 AM, Craig Spooner at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would like to build small training apps for faculty that would run in students' browsers. But downloading the MC engine and running the app separate from the browser seems altogether too cumbersome. Have I, indeed, misunderstood how this should work? No - the rest of the world has. :) Here's a comparison of a Helper App vs. a Plugin: Helper App: 1. Go to site, find out that you can't use some media until you download a Helper app. 2. Download it, and get confused about how to install it. 3. Fiddle with your browser prefs to get it to recognize your new MIME type, and reload the page. Plugin: 1. Go to site, find out that you can't use some media until you download a plugin. 2. Download it, and get confused about how to install it. 3. Leave the site you were at, quit the browser, restart the browser so it can recognize the plugin, and hope that you can recall the URL you were at to go back and finally view the media. ;) Exceptions to this are QT and Flash, since both come bundled with most browser releases for a few years now. Real Player is an exception, being a Helper App (and a darned ugly one at that), yet somehow people tolerate the dijointed user experience and designers don't seem to mind not being able to integrate Real media directly into their pages. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: more than one window/stack open
On 5/28/00 8:07 AM, doug rogers at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just downloaded the limited version of MetaCard to convert a portfolio HyperCard stack to MetaCard. I couldn't figure out any picture display commands, I have a number of QuickTime images that I discovered would display in the card window, but the window wasn't big enough. Creating a player doesn't also allow an image larger than the card window. Use the Import feature as well, or place an image object on your card manually and assign a graphic to it with the Inspector. The formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, PBM, PICT (on Mac), and others. You proably don't need to rely on QT for mere image display. As you work more with MC, I think you'll find such basics are very well covered with build-in objects, properties, and command. IMHO, MC is the most complete implementation of any xTalk. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Compaq pressario
On 5/28/00 5:59 AM, Isotalo at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has any one of you had extra problems running standalones on Compaq pressario? What sorts of problems? Is it a laptop or desktop model? I have had some problems from time to time with specific graphics chip sets, apparently across multiple OEMs, and in each case one that I'm aware of these two options has taken care of the matter: 1. Make sure you have the very latest graphics drivers from the manufacturer 2. Turn off the Hardware Accelleration option for your video card (right click on the desktop, select Options, click "Advanced Features"). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
QT recording
How many other people need the ability to record card images as frames in QuickTime files? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Metacard replacing Toolbook and Director
Yes! As I understand it, those people will need help. Asymetrix seems to be at least putting ToolBook on the back shelf: it's been two years and all they've come up with is a minor upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1. MetaCard is the closest thing they've got. Oh, and what a discovery it would be for them: - Great interpreter - All three operating systems families - Radically lower prices Two ToolBook programmers and three production staff cost a ToolBook shop: TB Instructor: $2495 x 2 = $4,990 TB Librarian:$995 x 3 = $2,985 __ Total Authoring Hit $7,975 Compare with a similarly-staffed MetaCard shop: MetaCard License: $995 x 2 = $1,990 MC Starter Kit: $0 x 2 = $0 __ Total Authoring Hit $1,990 "Save more than 75% -- go MetaCard!" :) The version issue raises a question: Mr. Raney, I know we all deplore companies who jump major version numbers for mere bug fixes (we needn't mention names of course), but tell us: Why are you so conservative with MetaCard's version numbers? 2.3 could well have been called at least 2.5. With it's QT support, new tokens, and much better Mac support, it's anything but a _minor_ upgrade. We appreciate the modesty, but from a marketing perspective have you considered the perceptual value of upping your version numbers to better communicate the strength of what you're delivering? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Features, etc
I think Mr. Rossi's post was as crisp and well-conceived as his excellent interfaces. If we're thinking seriously about market growth for MetaCard, the opinions of the people who've already bought it are less important that those who have not yet but might. One of my personal goals is to see Scott Raney retire early and well. What can be done with MetaCard's future to make that happen? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: The value
On 5/24/00 12:56 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your original post was: In HyperCard, the value of any phrase in quotes returns the entire phrase. In MetaCard, this: the value of "my dog" returns "my". Is this right? What are the rules? In this case, "my dog" might look like a quoted string, but in fact it's not by the time it gets to the value function. To pass value a quoted string, you would have to do: the value of quote "my dog" quote And as for the problem getting the last item as a unit, neither MetaTalk or HyperTalk can get you that because they don't pay attention to quotation marks when delimiting item chunks. Pasting this into the HyperCard message box: the value of "my dog" yields this result: my dog -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Make another applicatoin the top process
On 5/19/00 10:12 PM, Sivakatirswami at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I am using Metacard to process some mailing lists and from time to time want
to open the list in BBEDIT. I have set a button to launch BBEdit which
works, but then, once it is open if I hit the button, nothing happens. this
is probably correct behaviour, i.e. BBEdit is already open, so MC has not
reason to launch it. OK, so how do I make BBEdit be the top process or
active application (on a MAC)
H I could have sworn there is an "activate" event, with an id of
'acvt', in the "Apple events" suite ('aevt'). I just looked 'round, though,
and couldn't find anything like that.
Was I dreaming? How does activation work now?
I know there's an event for this somewhere
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
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Re: relative paths to media
On 5/18/00 4:00 AM, Kevin Miller at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 18/5/00 1:12 am, Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We considered this, but rejected it because I've seen many stacks that change the current directory to select different sets of images or movies (e.g., to support multiple languages), something that wouldn't work if you hard-wired the image/player paths to be relative to the stack path. This isn't an issue with stackFiles AFAIK, probably because using separate *stacks* for the different languages isn't a good design. Any other suggestions? I get it. I do have another suggestion: search the directory first as is done now. If (and only if) that results in file not found, search relative to the current stack? Sounds kind of unreliable to me. Sure it may be unlikely, but what if the current directory happens to have a file of the same name as some media file you're trying to access in the folder where your stack is? You might get the wrong image displayed, or worse, it would display the right image in your development environment and then fail later on in the distributed version because that image really *isn't* in the folder with the stack like you thought it was... An alternative might be an object property useDirectory or similar that defaulted to the current behaviour but could be turned off? Or perhaps this should be a global property? (I'm sure someone could think of a better name for it anyway.) I probbly won't get any points here by using HTML as a baseline, but whenever we think about storing media separately from the document at least it makes a familiar model: In HTML, the default behavior is to have media reference partial paths relative to the document making the reference. There is an option which allows one to specify a different base path, kinda like the directory property, but this is an option which must be explicitely set up by the user. I don't have a strong argument for the technical merits of such an approach, but I would suggest that the model would be immediately graspable to users. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: relative paths to media
On 5/17/00 5:42 AM, Kevin Miller at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. Why does the MC graphics importer use full paths, since we know in advance those will not work in a shipping app except in the unlikely occurrence that the drive letter, volume name, and all elements of the path are exactly the same? Have I missed something here? 2. Wen using a relative path, it seems dependend on the current directory, rather than the location of the stackfile the media is referenced in. Or is the path always fixed relative to the MC app/standalone? You need to set the directory property of the stack to on preOpenStack to match its fileName. How do we ensure that the directory isn't changed by some other routine between cards? For example, suppose we set the directory appropriately, and while going from card to card we run some utility from some other vendor which sets the directory property -- will future cards that open no have the graphics shown? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: mouseclicks outside of windows are lost
On 5/16/00 12:55 AM, Hugh Senior at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there any way to trap for global mouse clicks, those clicks which may occur outside of MC windows, on Win OS? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Are the suspendStack or focusOut messages sent during a repeat loop? Infinite repeat loops always worry me! It wouldn't be infinite if we could catch mouse clicks outside of the window. Any way to do that, anyone? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: mouseclicks outside of windows are lost
On 5/17/00 9:52 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It wouldn't be infinite if we could catch mouse clicks outside of the window. Any way to do that, anyone? Not that I can think of, because the OS doesn't provide this feature. I.e., what business is it of yours if the user clicks in another application? It's not another app: I have MC's backdrop showing? And I also agree with Hugh: any design that relies on events to break out of a repeat loop deserves to be rethought because there is almost always a better way. "Click to continue" is a pretty common convention. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: mouseclicks outside of windows are lost
On 5/17/00 11:07 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's not another app: I have MC's backdrop showing? Ah, so what you're really asking for is a way to get mouse events that are sent to the backdrop. Any suggestions on how this should be done? The usual messages sent to some object you specify, or maybe some special set of messages sent to the current card or stack? I'd be happy as a clam if we could simply trap backdrop mouse events in a backscript. Can you see any difficulties this might pose for the message path if the backdrop were a message trap between the topstack and the backscripts? And I also agree with Hugh: any design that relies on events to break out of a repeat loop deserves to be rethought because there is almost always a better way. "Click to continue" is a pretty common convention. True, but that doesn't mean you have to wait in a repeat loop for the click. And it's always been my experience that you have to click in the dialog to get it to continue... For About boxes, yes, but not for presentations and slide shows. They generally do not restrict the target area to specific regions of the screen, nor would that be a good idea if the boundaries for those regions are not visible to the user (such as a stack with a black backcolor against a black backdrop). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: getprop and setprop handlers
On 5/15/00 10:17 PM, Phil Davis at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While messing with Richard G's "going to a card without bringing a window to the front" problem, I found that you can do this: In a stack "A" button: on mouseUp put the specialStuff[2,3] of stack "B" into fld "stuff" end mouseUp In stack "B": getprop specialStuff[pData] put item 1 of pData into p1 put item 2 of pData into p2 return (fld p1 of cd p2) end specialStuff The index value of the getprop handler name carries the parameter value(s) to the handler. (But I didn't solve the original problem - sorry Richard.) No, it didn't, but it was way cool just the same. Thanks! -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
relative paths to media
I'm working on a cross-platform app in which we need to store the media
separate from our stack files. There will likely be one standalone and
several separate stack files which will run under it.
Because this is a cross-platform app, it would seem we cannot use full paths
to the files, since Mac uses the volume name to specify the root and Win32
uses the drive label ("D", "E", etc.).
So this leads me to a couple questions:
1. Why does the MC graphics importer use full paths, since we know in
advance those will not work in a shipping app except in the unlikely
occurrence that the drive letter, volume name, and all elements of the path
are exactly the same? Have I missed something here?
2. Wen using a relative path, it seems dependend on the current directory,
rather than the location of the stackfile the media is referenced in. Or is
the path always fixed relative to the MC app/standalone?
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716
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going to a card without bringing a window to the front
I have two windows open and I'd like to be able to alternately open cards in each without changing the layering order of the window. Using this: go cd 1 of stack "A" go cd 1 of stack "B" causes stack "A" to come to the front, then it brings stack "B" to the front. Is there a way to display a specified card in an open window without having that window brought to the front? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: backcolor by html?
On 5/8/00 10:42 PM, Christoph Wollek at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Halo all, is there a possibility for setting the backcolor of a word by html-shortcut, like setting the style "bold" of a word in a htmltext by B//B e.g.: replace "word" with "Bword/B" in text Thanks in advance The only way I know how is to do it in a var and replace it: put the htmlText of fld 1 into tData replace "word" with "Bword/B" in tData set the htmlText of fld 1 to tData -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Gamma fade up and down
Years ago, Mark Lucas produced a now defunct X called "Place Picture" that allowed importion and display of graphics into Supercard. (including, alas no longer available,. . .EPS files) Actually that was Mark Hanrek, not Mark Lucas, who wrote PlacePicture. And the EPS support was for EPS previews, the PICT thumbnail resources stored with such files (I wish we could have had a Postscript-to-QuickDraw translator built in, but that's a huuge amount of work). As for the gamma, as I understand it there never was a truly safe way to do a gamma fade. A few products, like Hanrek's, did some monkeying with the system to make it work on the majority of systems, but it's not 100% reliable on all systems -- on a few, once it fades down it will not fade back up again, requiring a reboot to reset it. There may be a way to smooth the built-in dissolve effect, but it's likely a non-trivial effort. Talking with Mark Lucas when he was revising SC 3.5, it seems that the tradeoffs between smoothness and performance are substantial. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Unique Identity?
On 5/2/00 9:58 AM, Scott Rossi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Windows, is there any way to give a MetaCard standalone and related files
a unique identity so files launched from the desktop know to open the
standalone instead of the MetaCard app? On a Mac, this could be done with
creator codes and file types, but can this be done on Windows?
Windows relies on the file type extension (".mc"), as set in the Registry.
MetaCard does not depend on this, however, relying solely on its header
info. This means that you can set the extension to anything you like, and
then just have your installer make the appropriate registry entry for you to
let the OS know to launch your app when files of that type are opened.
My favorite installer for Win: Wise Install
The registry entries could also be handled from within MC itself, if you
choose to make your own installer.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
_
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716
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Re: Sprite Libraries
In addition to MetaCard, I work with REALbasic. REALbasic has a sprite library built in. It's a third party software package, but bolted in for ease of use. Are there any cross-platform (obviously all three platforms would be best, but I'd still be interested in just about anything that got the job done on even one platform) animation toolkits that could be bolted into MetaCard. The level of access provided in RB is fairly simple: you have the ability to create and destroy sprites, give them a direction to travel in, and tell them to drop you a message when they collide with something. I don't think you have the ability to give them a sequence of images to cycle through automatically as they move, but obviously that would be a great feature. On the other hand, how far away is the move command from being able to a reasonable number (from an arcade standpoint--maybe ten to thirty) of objects moving around at the same time? Would it take a 1000 mhz processor, or a 100, mhz processor? :-) I'm curious if anyone has given it a try. I haven't tried it myself, but overall I've been very impressed with MetaCard's unprecedented interpreter speed. Given the mix of animated GIFs, the move command, and timers, I wouldn't be surprised if you got the same results using native MetaTalk that RB provides in this third-party package, and possibly even more given RB's lack of support for animation loops for sprites. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: regarding MetaCard Cross Platform Compatibility...
On 4/27/00 9:33 PM, Scott Rossi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Scott Raney rules. This sentiment cannot be echoed enough. Apologies for riding on the coatails of another user's praise, but Scott's devotion, persistence, and expedience when dealing with support is simply unparalleled and needs to be applauded. From arcane technical questions to been-asked-a-thousand-times pleas from new users, Scott continues to step in and provide the answers. What other company on Earth provides you with a custom build of their software to help you out of a last minute crisis? For anyone still on the fence about maintaining their MC license, the support alone should convince you to send in your cash. Thanks Scott. A *very* satisfied MetaCard customer. Everything Mr. Rossi said times two! -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
CSV
I'm working with some legacy data in (ugh!) CSV format (comma-separated values). Anyone have a quick-n-dirty method if turning that into the more sane tab-delimited format? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Answer File Title?
On 4/9/00 3:26 PM, Scott Rossi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a way to change the title that appears at the top of the answer file dialog? Currently it shows up as "Metacard - Open" and setting the title of the answer dialog via script doesn't seem to have any effect. Have you tried: answer file prompt e.g., answer file "Select a file:" Sure. And what happens (at least on MacOS) is that the prompt appears above the directory list as expexted, but the physical titlebar of the window reads "Metacard - Open". Am I missing something? MC doesn't support the NavSvcs dialog, and the old one has no title bar. Which Getfile dialog are you referring to? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Answer File Title?
On 4/7/00 4:59 PM, Scott Rossi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a way to change the title that appears at the top of the answer file dialog? Currently it shows up as "Metacard - Open" and setting the title of the answer dialog via script doesn't seem to have any effect. Have you tried: answer file prompt e.g., answer file "Select a file:" This seems to work here - not for you? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Player messages inconsistently sent?
HyperCard solves this by putting each QT movie in its own window. You can show the window as "borderless" and "non-floating" in order to make it appear to be part of the card. Clicks on the QT controller work normally. Keystrokes are not sent to the movie at all; they all go to HyperCard. If the stack author wants QT keystrokes to be enabled, the scripts must handle it themselves by trapping keydowns and forwarding them to the movie window. How do you do that, specifically? I phrased my comment badly; you can't actually just pass on the raw keystrokes. You have to script the movie commands. This approach allows you to get the messages, but doesn't solve the core problem: When I querry the player's startTime and endTime after having changed the selection with shift-arrowKey, the startTime and endtime have not changed. For some reason, MetaCard's internal understanding of the movie's startTime and endTime are different from the QT Controller's display. So any amount of monkeying with events will only solve the easy part, but not let me accurately retrieve the info I need. :( -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Statistics on MC
On 4/6/00 10:53 AM, Craig Spooner at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks Tuviah, but I was hoping for something like MetaTalk has x number of vocabulary items as opposed to Lingo or VB, which have y... Even if we don't know the figures for the other tools, does anyone know these "vitals" for MetaCard? ...Scott, have you every counted it all up? You can use the propertyNames function - and is there a messageNames function as well? If you compare messaages, which are the heart and soul of interactivity, I think you'll find MetaTalk has a significantly greater number than Lingo (about twice as many when I counted them two years ago). But I'm not sure this type of quantitative comparison is as meaningful as something more qualitative. For example, a Director apologist could argue that while Lingo has fewer messages, they do offer a great many arguments to those messages, and other functions as well, which often allow the developer to arrive at a similar solution. More effective might be to compare object models: Director was created for linear animation, and in spite of how I've been slapped at industry cocktail parties for this perception, I still don't think a linear timeline is optimal for designing non-linear media. Yes, it can be done, just as a screwdriver can be used to pound nails; "possible" should never be confused with "optimal". ;) If only someone had the cash to do a decent usability test on this I have a strong hunch such methods would prove me right on this one. There are some things for which Director cannot be beat: animated presentations, or even some CD-ROM games. But for designing true applications, choosing Director means working much harder than one really needs to; it was simply never designed for that and lives up to its design history in that regard. And then there's price: It is a continual source of annoyance among people I know that Director is falsely described as a cross-platform development solution. In truth, any version of Director is _half_ of a cross-platform solution - to get the other half you need to pay full price for a complete second copy just to deploy on another operating system. So an honest price comparison makes MetaCard look very favorable: MetaCard: $995 Director: $1,800 ToolBook: $2,495 (single-platform only, and in a scary position: they only managed to get from 7.0 to 7.1 over _two years_) One quantitative comparison might be useful: benchmarked interpreter speed. I've only compared HC, SC, and MC, and of course of the three MC is orders of magnitude faster for most operations (even more so in v.2.3). You're welcome to grab the benchmarking tools at my FTP server and make other version in ToolBook or Director if you like - I'd be very interested in the results. ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/MetaCard/4W_MetaBench.mc.sit.hqx ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/HyperCard/4W_HyperBench.sit.hqx ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/SuperCard/Tools/4W_SuperBench.sit.hqx -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Player messages inconsistently sent?
Given the lack of guidelines here, I think we have to create our own. With traversalOn, the developer *could* provide visual feedback by script if they wanted too, after all. Relying on having the pointer over the movie is just crazy. I've long felt the same way about working with console windows on Irix. ;) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: MetaCard survey time!
Thank you for posting the survey. How many years have you been doing this? Great to see this level of engagement with your customer base. As with your lightspeed support, with your efforts MetaCard Corp. continually raises the bar for software vendors. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: File path
On 4/5/00 8:32 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If I have a folder (A1) containing two folders (B1 B2) and my MC program in folder B1 wants to look for a file in folder B2, can a *relative* path be written to go from folder B1 to B2? For example, if my MC program "myProgram.exe" is in file B1 and I want to read a text file "theText.txt" in folder B2, is there a way to go *up* one level and then back to the appropriate folder in the path? Something like: open file "A1/B2/theText.txt"(which I tried but doesn't work) Try: open file "../B2/theText.txt" The "../" jumps up one level. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: More Multilingual Trouble
On 3/29/00 1:40 PM, Phil Davis at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Have you tried using HTML entity codes? It might work - seems like I had to do that one time. W3C's list of HTML 4 codes is at: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html Not all character entities are supported in MC, only the core set. For example, the common delta symbol (option-J on Mac) is not possible to implement in a cross-platform fashion without relying on special fonts. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
QuickTime, please give me my Enter key back
When playing a movie with the controller showing, it seems QT grabs all the keyboard activity before MC gets it. I need to trap the Enter key to do something other than what QT wants to do with it - any clues as to how I can prevent QT from grabbing that without first hiding the controller? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: cut copy paste buttons on the mac
On 3/16/00 1:30 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And speaking of the HIG, I just ran across the most egregious example of violating the rules I've ever seen in a Mac app. Naturally, it's in one of the standard applications that are bundled with every Mac sold. In MacOS 9.0, start up Simpletext and then choose "File/Open...". The mouse pointer is warped to be centered on the OK button. I am unable to reproduce this behavior on my G4 running OS 9.0.2. If it continues on your machine, yes, this would be most annoying (sure it isn't a third-party extension? I kinow Windows offers this as an option, but I don't recall seeing this on Mac OS before). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: GURLGURL
On 3/13/00 2:37 PM, Dave Cragg at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there truly no way to launch a non-browser/email application from MC without knowing its path? On Mac OS you can use one of Mark Lucas' handy x-thangs from his Wetware Collections (FinderOpen XFCN is the one you want, if memory serves). The Wetware Collection is now Open Source, available at: http://www.devhq.com/4w/ -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Porting icons from SC to MC
On 3/13/00 2:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a SuperCard application I am converting to MetaCard. I have used the conversion tool to convert the bulk of the application to MC but I do have some custom icons I would like to convert as well. What is the best approach? I hope I don't have to recreate the icons all over again. They are 32x32 pixels in size. To export icons in SC, you can use the 4W Resource Mover for SuperCard (ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/SuperCard/) to put the icons into the resource fork, and then use Graphic Converter to turn those info GIFs, which can then be imported into MC. Another method would be to make a 32X32 card in an SC window, and script a script which steps through a list of icon IDs, and sets the icon of a button on that card to each once, exporting the card to a PICT file each time through. If you name the resulting file to match your resource ID (e.g. "50018.pict"), you can easily reassign their IDs when you import the images into MC. Again, when you bring them into MC you'll probably want to do that in a platform-independent format, so consider running then through Graphic Converter to change them to GIGs before importing into MC. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 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.
Re: Broken records -:)
On 3/8/00 11:31 AM, David Bovill at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: PS: Broken record time again: you sent this message to the wrong address! Bug reports should be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED], not to the metacard mailing list. It's rare that anyone on this list is going to be able to help you in these cases, and about guaranteed that posting here will delay getting a solution to your problem. In all fairness to the posters here, the confusion is easy to arrive at given that the title of this list is "MetaCard-errors". -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: pasted card into script editor...
On 3/2/00 9:41 AM, Mark Mitchell at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On a related note, when importing images via the "snapshot" technique, I invariably import the image into the "importer" stack or the "messagebox" rather than the stack I'm working on. Is there a way to make the stack I'm working on the default stack for the importer? I noticed the importer stack script is to set the button for the "top stack" and I guess the importer stack becomes this. Should I change that script to "bottom stack" or something? If the top window of your stack opened as "modeless"? If so, that may be preventing it from becoming the defaultStack. Open your stack as toplevel and it should be fine. If not, we can look at other possible solutions, but rest assured that importing should work great when the window modes are set appropriately (toplevel). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QuickTime on Linux Petition
On 2/22/00 2:29 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just found this while doing a little research on LinuxPPC: It's a petition requesting that Apple port QuickTime to Linux. While I'd like to see them support other popular UNIX versions too, a port to Linux would get us 90% of the way we need to go, and would drastically improve MetaCard's support for cross-platform multimedia. I want *everyone* to go sign this thing. It's only 3 fields and an optional comment field: http://neutron.resnet.gatech.edu/qt-petition.html Thank you for posting that, Scott. I just signed it a moment ago. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Really, folks, Scott's not kidding. It's probably the best use of two minutes you'll ever find. Please plesae please please go to that URL and sign the petition today. Very important, very worthwhile, very little time required. If I find any of my clients on this list who haven't signed it, gosh darn we're gonna have a talk! :) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QuickTime on Linux Petition
On 2/22/00 4:47 PM, andu at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And have your family, friends do it too. But is it fair if they don't even own a computer? :) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
popup text list instead of a stack?
I just searched the MC 2.3 Read Me for "popup", and couldn't find the answer there so I'm here: Is there a way to use a text list of menu item names instead of a stack for the popup command? Any other command/function to accomodate this? I have an app in which I'd like to add a lot of support for right-click menus, but I'd much rather do it in code than actually build a stack for every context. Ideally I'm looking for something like this: on mouseDown put "Item 1"cr"item 2"cr"Item 3" into tMenuItems get PopupFunction(tMenuItems, the mouseLoc) DoSomethingWith it end mouseDown or if a command, it could look like this: popup tMenuItems, the mouseLoc get it Any suggestions? If it turns out that I must build a stack for this, how do you folks handle the resizing of all of the items within it to make it compliant with the appearance guidelines for each platform? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/12/00 11:02 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: put "00:00:01:02" into sctime put 4 into scframerate set the itemDelimiter to ":" put item 1 of sctime * 3600 + item 2 of sctime * 60 + item 3 of sctime \ + item 4 of sctime / scframerate into scseconds set the currentTime of player 1 to the timeScale of player 1 * scseconds Shorter than the one I've been using, but leaves one question open: How do I derive the frame rate? (other than asking the user to open the movie in QT Player first, that is). Stuff to look into: QT Timecode: http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/QuickTime/TimeCodes/QTTime Code.htm Archived sample code: http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/Archive/QuickTime/QuickTim e/TimeCode_Media_Handlers.htm I just saw these on the Apple Dev site. I'll plow through these and see if I can find anything useful (the first one seems the more useful of the two; the second is considered "unsupported"). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/12/00 12:09 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I guess you missed the gist of my question, which is how do you derive the frame rate *with* the QT Player? 1. Open a movie in QT Player 2. Select "Get Info" from the Movie menu 3. From the popup controls, select the video track and the Frame Rate option. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/12/00 12:09 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I guess you missed the gist of my question, which is how do you derive the frame rate *with* the QT Player? 1. Open a movie in QT Player 2. Select "Get Info" from the Movie menu 3. From the popup controls, select the video track and the Frame Rate option. That is, that'show _I_ get that info. How Apple does it is another story, but probably listed in the source files I found (listed in my previous post). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/12/00 1:52 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I guess the next question to ask, is "Why do you think you need show or accept frame information?" The frames aren't important to us - it's the time codes we're after. Any method to be able to reliably use standard SMTPE time codes would be acceptable (it's not just a SuperCard convention - see http://www.etcconnect.com/html/service_smpte.html). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Window maximizing - sorta kinda?
I have a stack with two substacks which are resizable. Both have their maxHeight and maxWidth set to 65535, yet when maximizing one it goes flush to the edge of the monitor, while the other seems inset a pixel or two. I can't see any obvious difference in the resizeStack code in each which might cause this. Anyone else experience this? What properties/actions affect the maximization of a window on Windows? TIA - -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: Answer Rename
on 2/11/00 11:16 AM, Scott Rossi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The mail archive search is down currently... Could some kind soul remind me what the method is to rename the Answer Dialog so it appears with a different name when displayed? I've tried several methods but only have managed to wind up confusing MC so it can't locate the stack. Set the label instead. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: opening standalones by clicking on a file
on 2/11/00 1:36 PM, Tereza Snyder at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Have you created/edited the necessary resources in the Mac standalone to link the application, the files, and the associated icons? The resources involved are BNDL and FREF (and any icon resources you need). You will also need to set the creator and file type strings for the relevant files. I have done this, and if I click on a BNDL'd file it DOES launch the app - but now the scripts need to know so they can read the file and do the right thing (set the prefs, show the text, whatever...); I'm stuck! Note: This is off the cuff, but if memory serves it goes something like this: on appleEvent pEvent, pSender, pID if pEvent = "odoc" then request ae data repeat for each line tFile in it -- open each end repeat end if end appleEvent -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
QT frames to time code conversion
Anyone have a handy pair of handlers for translating between frames and time codes and vice versa? I've started a pair here, but while I'm working out the bugs I figured it was probably not a good use of time to reinvent a popular wheel. Scott: Do you plan to include such handlers in the docs for the final 2.3 version? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/11/00 3:56 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't think it's even possible to do this in general because inter-frame rates don't have to be a constant. The engine calls the QuickTime function GetMovieNextInterestingTime() to determine when the screen needs to be updated. If you know the frame rate and that it is constant, the math to convert from a time to a frame is pretty trivial (e.g.: currentTime / timeScale * frame rate) Since we cannot gurantee a fixed frame rate as you point out, what mechanism exists for setting the starttime, endtime, or currenttime properties to a specific time? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: QT frames to time code conversion
on 2/11/00 5:03 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since we cannot gurantee a fixed frame rate as you point out, what mechanism exists for setting the starttime, endtime, or currenttime properties to a specific time? I'm not sure what you're asking for. You can set the times to whatever values you want, and can allow the user to create a selection based on what they *see*. Not sure how "frames" even enters into the equation. MC 2.3 does not appear to accept standard QT time values: set the starttime of player 1 to "00:00:01:23" ... generates a script error: expected integer. But these integer values are for the timeScale, which has no direct correlation to the frame rate. For example, I have some animation files here with a timeScale of 600, a frame rate of 4, and a duration of "00:00:01:00". So, given only a time code and a timeScale value, how does one accurately set the startTime, endTime, and currentTime properties to a particular time? Hope I didn't miss something too obvious (was up kinda late, needing a nap)... -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: splash screen strategy
on 1/31/00 11:19 PM, Steven D'Aprano at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For those interested, the look-and-feel discussion group for KDE on Linux recently discussed the issue of splash screens. They more or less unanimously threatened grievous bodily harm to anyone who used splash screens :-) The biggest gripe about splash screens is the annoying way human-loathing Windows designers use them: Too often they stay up until the user explicitely dismisses them. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: Referencing a Windows CD
on 2/1/00 7:59 PM, Geoff Canyon at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Department of Energy has awarded a grant of US $860,000 to spend over the next two years on development of easier-to-use software engineering tools for computational scientists and engineers. All of the work will be Open Source, in Python, and have a strong emphasis on design, testing, and documentation. For details, see: http://www.software-carpentry.com Python? Who paid 'em to make that choice? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: splash screen strategy
on 1/31/00 12:32 AM, H. Chaudet at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can someone point me in the right direction for creating a splash screen that shows briefly, then disappears to reveal the main screen of an application. I've created a small stack as the splash, to which I've added the other stacks as substacks. I usually do this backwards, using the mainstack in the way that SuperTalkers use an "anchor window", since the mainstack has the valuable role of serving as the equivalent of SuperCard's "project" object (the mainstack script is shared by all sof its substacks). Before using the xworlds exporter, I usually save myself some time and trouble and make an empty window in my SC project and copy the project script there in SuperEdit, and then run the xworlds exporter on this new version, so it keeps my translated object model as close as it can be. For splash screens, when I use 'em I often make 'em a substack, as the loast poster does. But lately I'm even having issues with that: My plan was to put up a splash screen first to give the user something to look at while my app is loading - the problem is that MC is often so fast that the splash screen appears only momentarily, requiring that I add an additional wait to make it less visuall disturbing, but adding a wait into a boot sequence just feels unclean in a Microsoft sort of way (remember that old joke C source file floating around listing the Win98 boot sequence?). :) -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: Screen Capture ?
on 1/31/00 6:35 AM, Blair Moxon at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When importing images using File/Import/Images, can they only be imported one at a time??? This is incredibly tedious and time consuming. There is a marvelous invention called 'multi-select' which would make my life much easier...this is standard in many image importing programs. Has anyone found a way around this? Not built in, but in a few minutes you could script a tool that will do that exactly how you want. Also, for future reference the checkbox that has the label "don't import" is bad U.I. It should read "externally reference" or something less misleading. Thyat's just staying in step with the Windows way, along with shutting down the computer with the Start menu. :) I've been meaning to suggest that myself - Scott, how about "Reference Only"? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: The Help menu
on 1/30/00 9:29 PM, Craig Spooner at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sure this is a stupid question, but can anyone tell me why I can't get the Help menu to go away? I'm using the Menu Builder, which creates three menus -- File, Edit, and Help. I want only the File menu, so I delete both the Edit and Help btns in the menu group, but the Help menu still shows on the Mac menubar (in fact, it's the only menu now showing). What's going on? I'm trying to create a single menu (File) with a single menuItem (Quit). I don't think you can get rid of the Apple menu either - I believe these are "standard" menus on Mac OS 8 and higher. Oh, and while I'm asking about the finer points of menus, how does one get a long pop-up menu to scroll up and down to show all of its contents? If this is in the documentation, I missed it and I apologize. Use v2.3. This is a known bug from earlier version which is addressed in the new (still gamma however) upgrade. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: Cross Platform Abilities
So, my question is who out there has really tested MetaCard's cross-platform abilities, especially from/to UNIX and Windows. Scott warned us about the font issue, which I guess is a given anyway. Any other comments? I personally am convinced that MetaCard is the way to go, but I need some muscle to flex at the customer. I can't speak for the Wintel-UNIX compatibility, since my playing with Linux has thus far been limited. But over the last year our company delivered about a half-dozen applications for both Mac OS and Windows. Given the relative similarities between Windows and UNIX (Mac really is rather the odd bird until we get to Mac OS X), I would think that MetaCard's grace and ease with Windows-Mac compatibility speaks at least as strongly. In our apps, MetaCard has allowed up to use less than 3% of platform-specific code - everything else is another great testimony to MetaCard's platform-independent interpreter (and ever so much faster than Icon Author's 5GL). With the client having been burned by the Icon Author experience, I understand their concerns but at the same time even those concerns make a strong case for MetaCard: Asymetrix bought Icon Author and failed to deliver. Sybase made Gain Momentum and lost interest. Oracle killed OMO outright after only 18 months on the market. The size of the vendor is no guarantee of the vendor's commitment. Meanwhile MetaCard Corp. has been actively developing and maintaining MetaCard, at this time the only truly multi-platform development tool aside from Java (and who has time to wait for all those classes to load? g). With the attention MC 2.3 has been getting (a great upgrade, and kudos to Scott for getting it mentioned in the Mac press), the MetaCard experience seems likely to outshine just about any other tool. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Mac tabs - way cool!
Scott - thanks for making the tabs look so nice for Mac OS. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: Efficient navigational handlers
on 1/18/00 5:00 PM, Gregory Lypny at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it more efficient to refer in a script to a card's ID or its assigned name? go to card ID 1234 of stack "Helter Skelter" versus go to card "Comin' down fast" of stack "Helter Skelter" You can measure the difference yourself using our MetaBench tool: ftp://ftp.fourthworld.com/MetaCard/4W_MetaBench.mc.sit.hqx -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: repost - answer icon bug?
on 1/18/00 6:40 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: According to README.2.3 this was added in the 2.1 release. I realize that there is a *lot* of stuff in there, but IMHO taking the time to read the whole thing at some point would be a good investment for anyone who wants to get the most out of MetaCard. Good advice. It's being printed now, for more careful review. You're right: it is a _very_ valuable document (in stark contrast to most marketing-drive Read Me's). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: MetaCard vs. Director, Authorware
on 1/16/00 3:14 PM, David Cramer at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Since Macromedia scuttled all Authorware development for Macintosh over a year ago, except for some spasmodic support for a Mac player, I have been extremely disillusioned with Macromedia's reliability generally. The rumor mill slates Authorware for discontinuation sometime next year. Who can say? Other sources say ToolBook isn't long for this world either (it's taken two years for Asymetrix to go from v7.0 to v7.1). Could be just rumors. No one can know for sure until a vendor comes clean in a press release, as MetaCreations finally did with its graphics products in December. But for clients who question the viability of MetaCard, I simply remind them of the big-vendor products that have been abandoned, including Asymetrix IconAuthor, Sybase's Gain Momentum, Oracle Media Objects, Apple Media Tool, Apple's HyperCard, Apple's ScriptX, and a host of others. Big companies, big plans, small execution. The viability of a vendor is no guarantee that their product will be viable. In contrast, MetaCard Corp. has been profitably maintaining and enhancing MetaCard longer than most other products have existed. Privately held, MetaCard Corp. is often more forthcoming about future development plans than any publicly-traded company can be. And focused on a single product there is no question about which part of the MetaCard Corp.'s product line is getting development resources. If a client is really nervous and has a lot of money, it is my understanding that MetaCard Corp. may be willing to negotiate source code escrow as assurance for worst-case scenarios, something the client will not likely find with any other vendor. Such escrow is not cheap, but guarantees viability for the code base in the event of total product or vendor failure. Of course there are other considerations, most chiefly infrastructure (consultants, third-party components, trainers, etc.), which play a key role in technology selection among the majority of clients. With MC's UI taking a backseat to its feature set (the UI favors the only platform that doesn't like to pay for software g), the development environment has had difficulty garnering the market share the interpreter richly deserves. Catering to niche geeks like you and me, the UI has kept MetaCard from hitting the critical mass within the market which would compel these infrastructure players to join in and raise its perceived value to match its actual value. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Re: MetaCard vs. Director, Authorware
It's no joke that the MetaCard slogan is "You know...there's an easier way to do that." Amen. And the cool thing is that most of the easier ways I've learned have come directly from the vendor. It's been noted before but cannot be overstated: MetaCard's support is truly best-of-class, and offers a level of partnership with the vendor that I have never even heard of elsewhere in the industry. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 This is the MetaCard mailing list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
