Re: Standalone Metacard Document Distribution Support (SMDDS):Starter Kit suggestion..
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: (snip) To be specific I suggest that: 1) the Starter Kit be broken down to appropriately compressed minimal engines for each platform, with "progressive download and save" options for all the relevant documentation and tutorials. Sounds reasonable, but would require abandoning InstallShield for the Windows installer (or require the user doing two installs, one to unpack, one to download the stacks, if what they wanted was the Starter Kit). I think this could probably be done (and we have no great love of InstallShield, believe me), but there are a couple of issues: 1) The total size of the download would be larger, because the engine is larger even than the InstallShield engine, not to mention the merely compressed files we distribute for MacOS and UNIX. 2) We'd have to have different installers for people who get the Starter Kit on CDs (either produced by us or others) or who need to install on systems without Internet access (note that the military and other secure facilities are a significant fraction of our installed base). 2) The Metacard site contains a page for cutting and pasting appropriate cross platform HTML code for use in a developers site. 3) A Javascript version is created for auto-platform detection with default code for all platforms for non-Javascript browsers 4) Appropriate html code is available for inclusion in emails, so that the recipient can easily follow the html links in the body of the email message to download the minimal engine. To give an example of how this would help, it would mean that all we would have to do to send someone an example stack is copy the relevant cross platform html code and include it in the email message alongside either the attached stack of another ftp link to where you have posted your specific stack. This would save everyone having to download all the engines for all the platforms, for simple quick distributions. The cross platform browser detection code would also be a useful community resource. Lessons from History... Macromind Director's Shockwave and Xtra plugin architecture only really started to take off when they improved there download site to make it eas(ier) for people download the Xtra and/or plugins for those people that did not already have them pre-installed. As I have to do this in any case, I am offering my services to try and crack this one. If anyone likes the idea and could help in any way please let me know what you think/what you could help with. Bullet proof cross platform browser detection scripts anyone? We'd be happy to host (or be a mirror site) for this type of "runtime installer" package, even if we can't use this system to distribute the Starter Kit itself. Regards, Scott **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: All things are not equal:
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: Maybe you all know this, but on the Mac I've got into the habit of using "" rather than the less than pleasing "" third estate alternative. Not sure if this is a font/or script editor incompatibility, but my PC balks at the beautiful sight of these characters - replacing the with an anonymous square (which quite rightly the engine rejects -:). It's just that the ISO character set doesn't include characters for not-equal, less-than-or-equal, or greater-than-or-equal. So they're translated to non-printing characters when you move a stack from a Mac to a Win32 or UNIX system. At least when you move them back to the Mac, the characters will still be there. Unequal cross-platform development? 8 months of Metacard development and this is all I have to complain about? C'mon Scott this contented customer thing is getting a little tiresome. Can't you throw in a few bugs - just for fun??? We've debated about adding support for these non-printing operators (they don't show up at all on UNIX systems), but so far have decided not to because they'd be pretty hard to edit around with the script editor. At least now they throw an execution error (or sometimes even a script error). Regards, Scott **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: dll's
On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Monte Goulding wrote: Hi since I've been playing with the xworlds external collection I've noticed the number of dll's installed on by computer. Is there any way to find out what these do and what parameters they take? The way I figure it if someones going to go to the trouble of filling up my computer with dll's then i might as well make the most of it. You can't use any of them with MetaCard. They all take typed arguments, which would mean you'd have to learn and keep track of your ints and shorts and floats and pointers and such (if you've ever seen the mess that's become of the ToolBook scripting language because of their strong dependence on this, you'd surely puke). Furthermore, most of them are highly dependent on the application they were designed for and so the odds are that no more than a handful of them would be of any use at all anyway. By the way I think the environment variables need to be better documented in the index (there is no listing of $0 or $1). These are not really environment variables, but instead the parameters passed to the executable when it starts up. Which in 99% of the cases on Windows are either empty or just contain the name of a stack to open. The only way to really use them is by starting up an executable from the MSDOS prompt, and who does that? I didn't realise that when you added an external to a stack it didn't actually import it until I was trying to open a standalone (that was meant to use EXT.exe) in front of a potential client. Probably more my fault than anyone else's but a bit more documentation would save a lot of support time. I'm not sure I follow this. Maybe something to do with the differences between the way these things are done on the Windows and UNIX (externals are separate files) from the way they're done on the Mac (resources attached to a file). Regards, Scott Regards Monte _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: resizing and screen resolution
On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Geoff Canyon wrote: On Monday, September 25, 2000, at 04:21 AM, Kevin Miller wrote: There may be - but changing resolution with MC open is not supported. I'm curious what you mean by "not supported." While building an 800x600 version of my app's main window earlier today/yesterday, I was dropping from 1024x768 to 800x600 and back again repeatedly with MetaCard running, checking to see what I was doing, with seemingly no ill effects. So is it just that there aren't any known issues, but it's not officially supported, or is there actually something bad happening and I just didn't notice and/or dodged a bullet? Actually it should be fine to do this on both Windows and Mac (UNIX/X11 doesn't support this anyway). The only serious issue that I can think of is that the new windowBoundingRect property isn't reset when you change the resolution, so windows may not always open in appropriate places. What probably *will* get you into trouble is changing the color depth (8/16/32). In particular changing in or out of 8-bit depth from either of the others will likely get you a psychedelic display though probably not a crash or other misbehavior. Regards, Scott gc ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: mcEncrypt
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Peter Reid wrote: Can I check what characters can be in an encrypted string as generated by mcEncrypt(). This is the function used to produce passwords by the Ask dialog but it is not documented in the help. I'd like to be sure that a generated password can't include the tab character as I want to store user passwords in tab-delimited records. Also, I'm generating dummy user data and want to generate passwords based on combinations of first names, surnames, initials etc. and don't want to generate passwords containing my field/item separator! It can contain tabs, so you'd better use the base64Encode() function to encode it before storing it away. Also, I'm assuming that there isn't an mcDecrypt (common practice with password systems is that they are one-way process only). If there is a decryption function, what is it called and what are its parameters? There isn't one. Scott Cheers Peter -- Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 owner is not always the owner - was best way to referto objects in groups...
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: I've done some testing on a simple stack and if you put the following lines of code in a group on a card: 1) "btn x of me" will uniquely refer to the object. 2) "btn x of the owner of me" will not. That's because "me" is a function, which works directly from the object architecture and "the owner of me" is a property expression which must necessarily be evaluated, during which any information about the object architecture is lost. In other words 1) works however things are named/ how objects outside the group are named. "btn x of the owner of me" however equates to "btn x of group someName", and if there are two groups called someName then it picks the first one, regardless if this group is the real owner! This is the problem. It's actually a "feature": this is the way HyperCard does it, and so is the way we implemented it. Of course, you can't have multiple groups/backgrounds on a card in HyperCard, so the ambiguity problem doesn't come up. It makes the syntax "owner of me" unusable if you want to create and independent group you can cut and paste on a card. Agreed. Any objection to changing behavior of "the owner" property so that it returns the long id of the object instead of the name? Seems to me that this will eliminate the ambiguity problem with minimal backward compatibility problems... Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: SendMail.mc preferences
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Dave Cragg wrote: At 1:13 PM +0100 9/21/00, Kevin Miller wrote: On 21/9/00 8:59 am, Dave Cragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A search for my smtp server address in the Windows Registry only produced a result in the settings for Outlook. So I guess each mail client keeps its own settings. I think you'll have to ask your users to enter the address themselves. But I'm still hoping someone else knows a way. Hm - if you know the location for the settings for Outlook, then you should just use those. 90% of people will be using Outlook as it is preinstalled, so reading in those settings and then bringing up a screen for the user to check the settings are correct the first time the program installs should do the trick. Those that aren't using Outlook can enter them then. The 90% figure is probably for Outlook Express. Outlook is a different program. I wonder who at MS thought up the naming. But actually, your point illustrates the problem of relying on such settings. For example, on my NT setup, Outlook Express is installed, but I've never used it or configured it. Other people may have configured it once, and then changed to a different e-mail program. If they subsequently change their e-mail service provider, the Outlook Express settings will be pointing to an old and probably unuseable server. We've already seen this problem with proxy settings for WWW browsers I guess it's first necessary to check the current default e-mail client (there is a setting for this in the registry, I think), and then check the smtp setttings for that client. But of course, you'd need to know the registry entries for a range of popular e-mail programs, and there is no guarantee that these would stay the same through version upgrades. This problem seems intractable to me, at least until the OSs all have a single standard way to store this type of information. This is why we explicitly don't support a "mail" or "open url with browser" command, and why we strongly discourage people from trying to build things like this into their stacks. It's a technical support nightmare. Asking the user to enter the smtp address is probably the safest solution. At least until we develop a way to do the DNS MX record lookups directly from within MetaCard, either with scripts or with a built-in function. Then you'll be able to send messages directly without having to rely on an SMTP relay server. Regards, Scott Cheers Dave Cragg -- _ The LACS Centre (Business English Training Resources) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lacscentre.co.uk _ **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Hi I'm new
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Monte Goulding wrote: I've been reading the list heaps and finding out almost all that I need to know at this stage but I have one big problem. I am developing a stack that needs to redraw an ellipse and a circular arc that intersects with the ellipse at two points. I thought that the oval graphic was the best tool for the job but how do I find the intersection points. The rect of the arc is set and the user sets the rect of the ellipse. I really only need to know the x coordinates so I can calculate the arcAngle and the startAngle of the arc. My understanding is that an oval has no real mathematical definition so is the oval tool actually an ellipse? Yes: Blame the HyperCard developers for this abuse of mathematical terminology, which we just followed. If so can I obtain the submajor and subminor axes of that ellipse? Given the imprecision associated with drawing ellipses and the differences in how they're drawn on the different platforms (and believe me, we've tried long and hard to eliminate or at least minimize these) IMHO you're probably not going to be able to do what you want using this style of graphic. Instead, I recommend using a polygon object and generating the points of the arcs and ellipses (and whatever other shapes you need) with scripts. This way you can be exactly sure where the points are, and that you have enough of them to make a smooth shape at any size. It does require a little math (high-school geometry), but doing it this way will save you a lot of time and headache in the long run. My other big question was why when we build a standalone there is no facility to set icons for that standalone other than 0(standalone builder custom prop mcappicon). I am planning to modify the standalone builder so that i can set an icon for a custom file type as icon 1(standalone builder custom prop mcdocicon). Is this modification a breach of license or anything? It would be really good If in future versions of MetaCard the engine had a couple more dummy icons in icon 2 3 so we could play with these too. There are two icons in the Win32 engine, one for the app and one for a document icon. You can change the first using the standalone builder, but you'd have to change the second with an icon editor (like AX-Icons) that can edit icons in place. I'll submit a feature-request for a way to change the second one in the standalone builder too. Regards, Scott Regards Monte Goulding Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: NT ?
On Thu, 21 Sep 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a MC program written in 2.2.5. A potential user contacted me to ask if it would run okay under Win NT 4.0 sp6. Has anyone had any experience with MC on NT machines? That's the platform the Win32 engine is developed on, and so in general should be the most reliable of the Win32 platforms to run MetaCard on. Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Feature request: clone as substack
On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, Geoff Canyon wrote: on 9/19/00 10:41 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you clone a substack, the copy *is* a substack of the same main stack. It's not possible in general to do what you want, though, because that would require nested substacks (which is something MetaCard supported before the 1.0 release, but which confused so many people that we took it out). Just out of curiosity, what would have been the advantage to having nested substacks? Increased script inheritance could be handled by frontscripts, backscripts, and start using. Stacks don't physically enclose each other, so what else is there? Inheritance of fonts and colors, and maybe somewhat easier organization and distribution of some types of applications. But the reason we implemented it that way originally was just that this was the most general way to provide a mainstack/substack architecture. Later on, limiting it to one level deep was pretty easy to do and didn't significantly impair functionality. Regards, Scott gc Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: EOF?
On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, James Parker wrote:
On 18/9/00 4:45 pm, James Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm reading a binary file a character at a time and looking for the
end-of-file marker so I know when to stop reading but the read terminates
before the entire file is read. There seems to be an eof marker in the
file that is not at the end of the file. CharToNum(EOF) returns a 4
which could appear at places other than the end of the file, right?
Is the following correct?
repeat forever
read from file sourcefile for 1 character
if the result is "eof" then exit repeat
put it into var1
end repeat
I'm not quite sure why you want to do this, why not:
read from file tSourceFile until eof
Thanks for your prompt reply, Kevin.
This is how I started reading files but discovered that when I read large
files this way it hangs the MetaCard application.
How large were the files, and on what platform? You should be able to
read just about anything on a Win32 or UNIX systems, but reading files
larger than a few MB on a Mac is probably not a good idea unless you
have a large amount of RAM.
If you really do want to read char by char for some reason, you need to
alter line 3 above to be:
if it is eof then exit repeat
Eof is a constant so can't be put in quotes.
The reason I did it this way is that the MetaCard documentation for
result says 'Returns a string describing the status of the last find, go,
open, send, or file operation command.' and for read it says that 'The
result will be set to the string eof when an end-of-file was encountered
during the read, or to an error message if some other error occured. An
empty result indicates a successful read.'
You did the right thing. When you don't want to put EOF in quotes is
when you're passing it to the read command (e.g., "read from file x
until eof").
Note that reading and writing to files is (except in a few special cases)
generally easiest done with the URL commands. E.g.:
put url ("binfile:"tSourceFile) into tVariable
Let me give this a try and see what happens.
This is functionally equivalent to "read until eof", it just saves a
couple of lines of script for opening and closing the file. Same
restrictions apply to the hardware/OS, though: You should only do this
if you're sure that there's enough virtual memory available on the
target system.
Regards,
Scott
Regards,
Kevin
Thanks,
Jim Parker
Kevin Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.runrev.com/
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Re: EOF?
On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, LiangTyan Fui wrote: How large were the files, and on what platform? You should be able to read just about anything on a Win32 or UNIX systems, but reading files larger than a few MB on a Mac is probably not a good idea unless you have a large amount of RAM. Is this applicable to all MetaCard disk I/O commands on Mac, or just effecting: put url "binfile:thefile.txt" where it really reads the entire file into RAM? That, and "read ... until eof" both read the whole file into RAM, which means you need to have enough. This is functionally equivalent to "read until eof", it just saves a couple of lines of script for opening and closing the file. Same I must say "put url" has been my favourite command dealing with files. However, I am planning to use the more traditional "open" and "seek" command to deal with large files. My only problem is how find out the current reading/writing position of the file. Yeah, currently you have to keep track of all your reads and seeks because there is no "tell()" function that returns the current file pointer. Scott Thanks. LiangTyan Fui Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 on MacOS X?
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, James Kelly wrote: Anybody know if Metacard will run under MacOS X Carbon? I know, it will. *When* it will, I don't know (or at least can't say ;-) Scott jk Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Detect all connection requests?
On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Pierre Sahores wrote: Phil Davis wrote: I would like MC to detect all incoming connection requests, regardless of the requested port, and respond by issuing a message. I envision a message whose parameters contain all available info on the connection request. If the connection request is for a port where the stack is listening, this message would be fired before the socket is opened. For example: on socketRequest pPortNum, pRequestData if pPortNum is among the lines of the permittedPorts of me then pass socketRequest else put short date long time tab \ pPortNum tab \ digested(pRequestData) cr \ after url "file:log" end if end socketRequest Maybe it could be used to prevent the opening of an otherwise accepting port under certain conditions, similar to the way "closeStackRequest" can be used to prevent the closing of a stack. This feature would enable us to build things like firewalls that log all connection requests, whether they were honored or not. Does this sound useful to anyone besides me? -- Phil Davis --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] days: (503) 417-7930 eves: (503) 557-5656 --- Facilitator Essentials of eBusiness Computing Information Technology Institute http://www.iti.com 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. That's would realy be a top key feature Phil, even on unixes, probably usable to secure ip-chains configs... Is it a way to do that avalaible in mc, Scott ? I guess I really don't follow this. If what you're trying to build is some sort of proxy or firewall, this could probably be done with using the standard "accept" command. But there is no way for one process to "pass" a socket request onto another process, so you'd have to do it the way existing firewalls and proxies do: you accept a connection from outside and then open another a socket connection to the inside, then write data read from the outside socket to the inside socket. And I say "probably" because at least some types of socket-based protocols require access to low-level socket features not available in the MetaCard sockets API (out-of-band data being the most notable of these). Regards, Scott Regards, Pierre Sahores WEB, DB, B2B ASP design. Because people develop knowledge from scratch rather than being born with built-in knowledge, we can adapt to different circumstances. Sampson, Geoffrey. Educating Eve : The "Language Instinct" debate. London: Cassell, 1997 [1999]. **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: htmlText - problem and feature request...
On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Karl Becker wrote: An htmlClickChunk property which would return the same as the clickChunk but something appropriate to the htmlText. Similar properties would eventually needed for other Metacard expression (hence the idea of a single function above). It should be possible to do this with the existing HTML text features as soon as we get hidden tags implemented. I'm not sure yet whether even totally useless stuff (like LINK tags) will be retained, but certainly stuff like HREF tags will be. Regards, Scott When will this feature be implemented? Relatively soon (2.3.x) , or will a major overhaul be needed? I'll need a technique to keep these kinds of tags for a project, but if MC will natively support keeping most tags, I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if you guys already are :) No major overhaul will be required because the field control was designed with this need in mind. But I can't make a specific prediction about what version will have it or when that will be released. Sorry. Regards, Scott Thanks! -- Karl Becker, KB Productions | Featuring Tiger's Eye Casino, http://www.karlbecker.com | The Fishin' Hole, and New Tricks | | Also featuring un-cut writings of Karl! Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Apple has released Mac OS X Beta
On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Pierre Sahores wrote: Geoff Canyon wrote: It's not downloadable--you have to buy the cd for $29. Does it make me a simpering MacFool that I already ordered mine? Don't answer that. :-) http://www.apple.com 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. Scott, Is it a way to get the FreeBSD issue of Metacard running under the beta of this new MacOS X version ? No, that's for Intel processors. An equivalent engine will probably be made available for Mac OS X, but it will be different from the Carbon engine (sort of like the Win32 console engine is different from the regular Win32 engine). Regards, Scott Thank's, Pierre Sahores WEB, DB, B2B ASP design. Because people develop knowledge from scratch rather than being born with built-in knowledge, we can adapt to different circumstances. Sampson, Geoffrey. Educating Eve : The "Language Instinct" debate. London: Cassell, 1997 [1999]. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Question about 2.3.2
On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: Trying Metacard beta 2.3.2, and nice to see tow of my top wish list features in it - sound control for QuickTime and better resolving of URL's with the built in HTTP features. Thanks. From: Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 12:02:48 -0600 (MDT) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: client side http On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Dave Cragg wrote: 2.3.2 already has one new feature that will make implementing such a library much easier: a "wait for messages" command which allows event dispatching within a handler. This is useful for building synchronous function calls that still require some event dispatching (e.g., one that does the equivalent of "get url http://somehost/somefile"). This sounds like something I've always wanted. Is there any documentation on this feature. I've downloaded 2.3.2 for the Mac and read the readme, but... What would be the best tactic now for doing something like background indexing of text fields? I have a complex indexing scheme which takes some time for each piece of text, I want to be able to index these in passes without interrupting the working environment. Can I use "wait for message" in some way to do this? I am guessing that while it is waiting other scripts can execute? Can I use this to effectively do: wait for message "notDoingAnythingTest" continueIndexingALittle wait for message "notDoingAnythingTest" continueIndexingALittleMore You could do it this way, but using "send .. in" would make a lot more sense. Note that "send .. in" messages are also only sent when there aren't any OS-generated events in the queue, which means that interactivity always has priority over these background tasks. You do still have to exit from your "continueIndexingALittleMore" handler after a short time (say, 200ms) periodically, though. Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Graphic Display
On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, opus.species wrote: Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Both of these problems are almost certainly due to bugs and other non-features in drivers for the graphics card you're using and not anything to do with the hardware or OS. The standard procedure for dealing with these is: 1) Make sure you have the absolute latest drivers from the vendor's WWW site. 2) Disable acceleration in the Display and/or System control panel. Trying other screen resolutions or color depths might also be a workaround. 3) Find a reproducible example and report it to the vendor and insist that they fix it. We're always happy to help any vendor identify and fix the problem, but have yet to be contacted by any of them even when we ourselves have reported the bugs to them. Sometimes the bug quietly gets fixed in a new driver version, but more commonly the vendor just blows off anyone that reports bugs like this. 4) Get a different, more reliable, graphics card. Unfortunately we can not always choose our customers nor let them buy new computers ... so we have to get workarounds ! It's perfectly acceptable for you to expect your customer to have a working system, and if they don't, to get them to upgrade or reconfigure it so that it works right. There's a really serious problem with the idea that you have to expend more than a token effort to try to make your application work on all systems. You may end up losing a significant number of sales (perhaps even a majority) to the 99% of potential customers with working systems who don't buy it because they need some feature that you can't provide because you're wasting so much time (and/or giving up so much design flexibility) trying to work around problems that only affect the 1% who bought some piece of junk computer and don't know how (or care to learn how) to fix it. At some point you just have to write the losers off... According to my tests, there are "incompatibility problems" between MC, some video card drivers and some non-really-standard file formats. - MC display always OK the RVB jpegs, but display sometimes bad the gray-level jpegs or the "optimized" jpegs. There were problems displaying some types of JPEGs 2.3.1 and previous releases, but these should all be fixed in 2.3.2. These are independent of the graphics card problem because a given image would look wrong on *all* systems. - MC display always OK the ordinary gifs, but display sometimes bad the transparent gifs Sometimes these can be fixed by setting the constantMask property to true, but sometimes it's a driver problem (masked images are usually the most common place to see these problems). Again, it depends on whether the image appears correct on some systems, or wrong on all of them. For jpegs, the workaround is easy : open the files in Photoshop, transform as rvb images and save as standard jpeg files. The same for plain gifs. For animated or transparent gifs, i am still looking for a reliable solution. I've got one: Only distribute your application on UNIX and MacOS systems, which AFAIK never have these kinds of graphics-card dependent problems ;-) Regards, Scott Regards, Claude **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: client side http
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Dave Cragg wrote: I've been playing with the sockets features in order to try and implement some client side http. I've been doing this because Metacard's built-in http support won't work with some URLs (something to do with the way aliasing is set up on the server, I think). Please try 2.3.2, which is a lot better about these things. It has just been released to beta test and now available for Linux, MacOS, and Win32 in the directory ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.2/ The script below is a crude first attempt at this. It simply loads the data from the specified URL. (I've removed some stuff that was specific to my situation.) So far, it seems to work, even with previously unreachable URLs. Ideally, I'd like to be able to emulate the built-in http features of Metacard, but using sockets. (I've also had a go at the POST method, and it seems to work, but I need to make a more general solution than what I've done so far.) We're actually working on the same thing, as the plan all along was to replace the built-in HTTP routines with an script library that uses sockets to do HTTP, FTP, and other protocols. We welcome your participation in the design, implementation, and testing of this new library. 2.3.2 already has one new feature that will make implementing such a library much easier: a "wait for messages" command which allows event dispatching within a handler. This is useful for building synchronous function calls that still require some event dispatching (e.g., one that does the equivalent of "get url http://somehost/somefile"). The scripts may be useful to anyone else wanting to do the same thing. More importantly, I'd appreciate any feedback from the sockets gurus about whether I'm going in the right direction. Two questions foremost on my mind: In order to show progress of the download (progress bar or whatever), is it necessary to do reads in short steps (as in the script below) or is there another way? The best way to do it is to do a simple "read from socket s with message m" and handle the assembly and processing of the data in the message handler. This does the chunking automatically for you in whatever size chunks the OS is dealing in and so is the most efficient method. How to handle http proxies? Is this just a question of opening the socket to the proxy and carrying on as before, or is it, as I fear, more torturous? There are (at least) two types of proxies: those that you know the address of and those where the proxy is actually specified as a URL of a document which contains the proxy information. MetaCard's built-in HTTP support supports the former, but implementing support for the latter is one of the things that the new script-based library will do. Regards, Scott Any comments appreciated. Cheers Dave Cragg _ The LACS Centre (Business English Training Resources) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lacscentre.co.uk _ ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: A few short questions
On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Peter Reid wrote: Here are some questions that have occurred to me during my development work using MetaCard. I'm not sure whether I'm simply missing a few tricks (not unheard of!), or whether these are genuine feature holes. Some 'constant' questions: 1) Is it possible to declare global constants or are all constant declarations limited in scope to the script in which they are contained? They're limited to one script. Suggestions about how to do it globally (like a #include in C) are welcome, but the discussion about this on the xtalk mailing list awhile back broke down before any suitable method was proposed (the big problems are establishing *when* the definition is to be done and what to do if the #included script isn't found). 2) Is it possible to declare a non-printing (special) character as a constant, e.g. something like "constant CRLF = $013$010" to declare a end of line constant? No, but "crlf" already is a pre-defined constant ;-) 3) Is it possible for a constant declaration to include expressions, e.g. something like 'constant padding = tab "|" tab'? No, they must be either strings or numbers. Allowing escapes (like C strings) is something we considered but rejected. Some script debugging questions: 5) Is it possible to insert some special breakpoint or trap command that let's you run scripts at near normal speed (without having the script debugger open), but that will suspend the execution and allow you to look at variable values etc. single step etc. - i.e that will throw you into the script debugger ONLY when you reach a breakpoint? No, but this is on the feature-request list. 6) Is it possible to 'watch' a variable, i.e. set up a monitor that only kicks in when a named variable's value changes? Theoretically, yes. But there is no UI that supports this now so you'd have to hack up the debugger scripts, which is not an endeavor to be taken lightly. Regards, Scott Cheers Peter -- Peter Reid Reid-IT Limited, Loughborough, Leics., UK Tel: +44 (0)1509 268843 Fax: +44 (0)870 052 7576 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.reidit.co.uk ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Graphic Display
On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Eva Isotalo wrote: Similar happens here. I've a new Athlon 700 Mhz which behaves strange. Images are often gray at first. There are long delays between opening stacks and such. The Win machine I had before was 233 Mhz Intel don't remember but it worked much smother than this one. We found one "reason" for strange behavior - if screen resolution is set to the highest (I'm not with the Win-machine right now so I don't know the messurements, but 2 steps over 800x640) and Color to 16 bit, then palette stack are not drawn properly. Sometimes they are there and sometimes not. When lowering resolution one step this problem went away. But besides that we haven't a clue why it seems slower on a faster machine. Both of these problems are almost certainly due to bugs and other non-features in drivers for the graphics card you're using and not anything to do with the hardware or OS. The standard procedure for dealing with these is: 1) Make sure you have the absolute latest drivers from the vendor's WWW site. 2) Disable acceleration in the Display and/or System control panel. Trying other screen resolutions or color depths might also be a workaround. 3) Find a reproducible example and report it to the vendor and insist that they fix it. We're always happy to help any vendor identify and fix the problem, but have yet to be contacted by any of them even when we ourselves have reported the bugs to them. Sometimes the bug quietly gets fixed in a new driver version, but more commonly the vendor just blows off anyone that reports bugs like this. 4) Get a different, more reliable, graphics card. In any case, it would be helpful to know which specific graphics adapters you see these problems with so that we can warn others not to buy them. Regards, Scott Regards, Eva ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Using groups - geometry management
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: I have the idea that I can use groups to simplify the task of complex geometry management. The aim is to have each group act as an independent object, so that groups can be added or subtracted without having to change any of the other existing groups. The strategy is: 1) For each group to have a "resizeStack" handler 2) Each "resizeStack" handler sets the position of every within the group unless it is a group, in which case it send a "resizeStack" message to the group. Note that first level groups (those directly on the card) will automatically get this message, so all you need to do is be sure to pass it in each handler so that the next group down will get it. Be very careful sending a standard message to any object and especially to child objects: you may find yourself in an infinite loop if the child doesn't handle the message and it makes its way back up to the parent object (which resends it...). It'd probably be better to make up another message to send to the nested groups. At the moment the problem I am having is that if I clone the group, the scripts within the group seem to affect objects outside the group which naturally enough now have the same name. Renaming the group does not help. Of course renaming all 40 or so objects solves the problem, as would using long names of id's. I was just wandering if there was a simple way of restricting the action of a groups scripts to the groups contents? Would it work in general to add "of me" to the short name of any object referenced. Does this work with objects nested within groups in the group concerned? It should, yes. As always, any help appreciated, I'm working on a complex group and it could take me a whole day to find out that some unforeseen problem with a naming strategy brakes the entire strategy. Another feature that might be useful is the groupNames and groupIDs properties of cards. They return a list of the group objects on that card, so you can deal with those first level groups separately. Regards, Scott Ta **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Avoiding home... script limit problem.
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Geoff Canyon wrote: on 9/6/00 1:04 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, for you Mac users, how about each time you try to run an AppleScript it instead brings up the Script Editor? Wouldn't be very convenient, would it? But this is exactly the way it works. You can save an AppleScript in two ways, for the purposes of this discussion: as a script, and as an application. Double-clicking the script brings it up in the development environment. Double-clicking the application brings it up as an application. Seems pretty comparable to a stack and a standalone to me. It isn't, both because of the much greater file size of the standalone and because you can't under any circumstances edit a standalone whereas editing a script is always possible regardless of whether the OS treats it as an executable when you double click on it. on 9/6/00 12:34 PM, Jacqueline Landman Gay at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How about adding a preference setting to MC, allowing the user to set whether the development environment launches or not? How about a property for the stack, which would allow you the developer to determine how the stack behaved, regardless of the machine it was opened on? Sounds good to me. Anyone else? What's the default? on 9/6/00 7:50 PM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Another example: try creating a text file in a Windows text editor and save it as "whatever.bat". Then find it in Windows explorer and double click on it. Does it open in the application you used to create it? No, it runs it as a batch file. The same kind of thing happens on UNIX systems with a GUI, except that instead of keying off the file extension, it distinguishes these files with an execute bit in the file permissions. MetaCard stacks have this bit set on UNIX systems so they can be run directly from the command line, or by double-clicking on them in a GUI file browser. So what would happen if the execute bit weren't set on Unix? It sounds like the stack property idea I proposed above is fairly close to what already exists. In windows, you have to _change_ the file to make it an executable; until you set the extension to .bat, it's an editable thing, not an app. So MetaCard stacks, extension .mc, open in the editing environment. MetaCard executables, .me (or whatever) just open and run, no editing environment. Couldn't this be set up as easily on Mac and Unix? Doing it by extension is a possibility, but doesn't sound so great to me. Mac users tend not to use them at all, and even on Windows and UNIX you run into all kinds of problems trying to map two different extensions to the same engine. I'd say a stack property would be a better way. Scott ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Paint Tools/Stand Alones
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: Amazingly, after downloading a black and white GIF that originally started in Illustrator as a vector drawing, and putting it into an image. . .it is paintable with MC paint tools! I didn't know a b/w GIF became "bit map" image. "Fills work inside what were previously closed paths in Illustrator . . .fantastic, two years of work by our art director suddenly become a dynamite on-line coloring book. (Mystic Mouse) Coloring Mystic Mouse on line will be very intriquing for kids. So now I am experimenting with building coloring/painting tools. We note that if you look in the Metacard Menu Bar you see all the painting stacks. I cloned all those to another stack as a starter kit. But this is all very tricky and will take some time. Questions: 1) I am wondering if someone has already done this. And could share it with us? i.e. a suite of paint tools that runs under the player? Don't know of any, but you're free to adapt any of the tools in the Starter Kit and redistribute them. 2) Scott, are there any icon numbering issues I should be worried about? obviously I have to set the numbers for all the patterns and also the copies of the paint tools icons to a higher range. . .any recommendations there? You shouldn't need to renumber the icons, even if you change them, as long as you're not redistributing them to people as part of a stack development environment. If you are, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we'll send you a block of numbers that you can use for this. Pretty much the same rule applies to patterns, though since they're not used as often the risk of two products using the same id is much less. 3) In MC paint tools, when you select a pattern there is no way out back to no pattern, that I could find. What am I missing? Or is this a "gap" and I need to create my own button to set the pattern empty? Set the brushColor to whatever color you want. 4) The instructions for the Paint tools are way off. . .it refers to use of the control key but on the mac it is the command key. Is there an updated cross platform reference FAQ update for the paint tools? I will need to supply this with my stacks to help novice painters. Not that I know of, but if you've got a specific list of errors, please send it in so we can fix the CT documentation. 5) in the Paint Tools environment, Color chooser, only the pen and brush colors are active, I presume this is all that apply to paint tools (at least that is all that seemed to apply when I tried all the tools) i.e. foreground color and back ground color etc all are inactive. . .and I can remove all those from the color chooser stack that I create for the kids running under a standalone. True? Yes. Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Saving images and sounds to disk
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: OK, we download a GIF put it into image "A" now we let the user color the picture and now she wants to save her picture to disk as a GIF or JPEG. on mouseUp ask file "Please name your picture." put "binary:" it into tPicturePath put image "A" into url tPicturePath end mouseUp The above does not work. What am I doing wrong? While you can use the contents to get back out the original image data if the file was imported as a GIF, PNG, or JPEG image, once you edit an image it is recompressed using a proprietary RLE algorithm that isn't very conducive to getting back out as the contents. And note that exactly what you get back out in this case will probably change in some future release. But you're not completely out of luck here: It will be possible to export images as JPEG (and maybe PNG) format in 2.3.2, scheduled to go to beta test next week. GIF is something we're still planning, but we haven't dealt with the patent licensing issues yet and so it won't be in 2.3.2. We want to also do a similar thing with sounds: download an mpg. set a player to the URL, let the user play it (this works assuming the sound is completely cached") then we want to let him save it to his hard drive. Or in some cases we want to save the sounds into a prefs folder we have created before. What would be the way to do that. . .I suspect it will be very similar handler to the above. Saving a file that you've downloaded should be no problem, though there's no way to edit it. Regards, Scott Thanks! Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Avoiding home... script limit problem.
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote:
I want to be able to launch a stack directly from the file system, but with
all the usual features of the development environment. I've filled in the
Menubar field in the Stack Properties" dialog and copied the following
script from the home stack:
send "preOpenStack" to card 1 of stack "MetaCard Menu Bar"
I get the standard menus showing and available - however the script limits
are not set. Is there a way to do this? I have looked through the tools
stack scripts and home scripts, and can't find anything.
My guess is that the engine looks for the custom properties in the "Home"
stack and...
Hmm, I'll try copying the custom properties, and report back.
That won't do it: the bits used to check the license are stored in a
way that is not accessible via scripts or object properties.
Furthermore, it'll only work right if the Home stack is the first
thing loaded because the engine has certain assumptions in it about
how things are loaded when you're doing development. So the only
workaround for the current behavior is to write some scripts and use
an external tool such that it completely exits out of the current
session and restarts a session specifying both the Home stack and your
other stack on the command line (e.g. "mc mchome.mc yourstack.mc").
Not even sure if this is possible on the Mac.
Having starting up a stack from the desktop automatically open the
development environment is on the feature request list, but won't be
in the upcoming 2.3.2 release and I must admit still doesn't sound
like a "feature" to me. What if whenever you started up an app
produced with Codewarrior or Visual Studio it started up that
development tool and opened its debugger if you happened to have one
of those tools installed on your system? Could be pretty
inconvenient. Or if you developed that Perl or shell script with
Emacs and every time you tried to run it started up Emacs for you?
Pretty bizarre.
This really gets back to the issue of "are stacks documents or
applications?" debate that has come up several times in various places
over the years. My UNIX and CS background causes me to consider them
applications, whereas people with a less technical background tend to
consider them documents. Not sure where to draw the line on this
one: Abide by user expectations, or force them to adapt to a more
technically sophisticated architecture?
Regards,
Scott
****
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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Re: Avoiding home... script limit problem.
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote: Scott Raney wrote: This really gets back to the issue of "are stacks documents or applications?" debate that has come up several times in various places over the years. My UNIX and CS background causes me to consider them applications, whereas people with a less technical background tend to consider them documents. Not sure where to draw the line on this one: Abide by user expectations, or force them to adapt to a more technically sophisticated architecture? How about adding a preference setting to MC, allowing the user to set whether the development environment launches or not? That way you wouldn't have to decide whether or not stacks are apps, and everyone could work according to their own preferred method. The default could be the way it is now (launch MC first before opening a stack if you want to develop) but could be overridden by a preference checkbox that forces all stack launches to be opened in development mode. Except that the preferences are stored in the Home stack because there isn't any other cross-platform-compatible place to put them... Regards, Scott -- Jacqueline Landman Gay| [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Custom hypermedia solutions | http://www.hyperactivesw.com 612.724.1596 | 612.724.1562 - fax ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Avoiding home... script limit problem.
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Scott Rossi wrote: Recently, Scott Raney wrote: This really gets back to the issue of "are stacks documents or applications?" debate that has come up several times in various places over the years. My UNIX and CS background causes me to consider them applications, whereas people with a less technical background tend to consider them documents. Are pages of text considered "applications" on UNIX? Certainly. In fact these are the most common "applications" on UNIX systems, whether they're written as shell scripts (known as batch files in DOS) or written in some other language like Perl/Python/Tcl/awk/sed. I would imagine these are incapable of launching or being edited without some type of engine. True, but Microsoft Word won't run without dozens of .DLL files, which are functionally equivalent to the MetaCard engine. Isn't a MC stack the same type of animal? You can't launch or edit a stack without some type of engine, regardless of whether the engine is external or bound to the stack. Granted, I am "less technical" but since (as far as I know) you can't "technically" do anything with a stack unless you have the engine, a stack would be considered a document. OK, for you Mac users, how about each time you try to run an AppleScript it instead brings up the Script Editor? Wouldn't be very convenient, would it? Not sure where to draw the line on this one: Abide by user expectations, or force them to adapt to a more technically sophisticated architecture? I might suggest catering to clueless folks like myself, in the interest of remaining approachable. The people who have more technical understanding will "get it" on their own. Except they'll be annoyed by the fact that every time they try to run an application, they'll get the development environment instead of what they want. And unlike the reverse, there's no workaround for this behavior (and don't suggest the "hold down the option key" hack: Are you going to sit at your WWW server console 24x7 so that every time a CGI program runs it won't start up the development environment?) Regards, Scott Regards, Scott _ Scott Rossi Tactile Media - Multimedia Design Creative Director Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.tactilemedia.com 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. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Avoiding home... script limit problem.
On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, David Bovill wrote: Lot's of philosophy here, which seems to go with everyone's previous user experience and background... But cutting through this there is a practical problem. If (as I do) you are interested in distributing information, to people in a number of separate stacks you want them to be able to open any of the stacks to launch the overall environment. if I open a Histopathology stack I want to launch the environment and start reading Histopathology, and so on for other stacks. I'm not sure I follow this. The problem is merely with opening the Home stack which governs MetaCard's development environment, not anything to do with distributing stacks that don't do this (as no stack you distribute should need to do). I shouldn't have to drill down through the home stack and the environment shouldn't be broken if I inadvertently try to open the file I want to read. There has to be a way to do this, if not I'd have to go around putting yellow post -it-notes on all the computers saying "Please remember to...", or perhaps I should hide all the stacks I don't want people to open directly? If you need to have other stacks open, you can just make sure they're loaded in a preOpenStack or openStack handler What happens if I want someone to open a document I email them (and they have some form of development environment - perhaps the Starter Kit), do I have to email them a standalone? Or do I have to remind them to open the development environment first (and not directly from the email client) each time I send them some information or they download a stack from a browser? This is exactly the problem: if they have the Starter Kit and the default is always to open it any time you open any other stack, you'd always have to distribute standalones for all of your applications. Regards, Scott ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Valentina XCMDb2 Released
On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Geoff Canyon wrote: on 9/3/00 11:28 AM, Scott Raney at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you have any questions or download it and can't figure it out, don't hesitate to contact either me or Paradigma Software. This is a key technology for MetaCard developers to have in their arsenal and we need to do what it takes to make sure that it works well. Regards, Scott Funny you should post this, Scott, I was about to send this to the list anyway, so now it's a reply to your message: Does MetaCard support COM? If so, how easy/difficult is it? I'm asking because the Valentina database comes in an XCMD format, which should work on the Mac (but I haven't tried it yet) and what they call a VCOM/ActiveX format. So, can you use the VCOM/ActiveX version of Valentina with MetaCard on the PC? No. The VXCMD is being distributed as a regular MetaCard external for Win32 platforms. This means that the API is exactly the same as it is for the Mac, which means you don't have to change your scripts at all to run on both platforms. Supporting COM/ActiveX would not only require you to completely rewrite your scripts for each platform, but also require you to muck around with low-level details like having to declare the types of all your variables like you have to in low-level languages like BASIC and C/C++/Java. Regards, Scott Thanks gc Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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.
Valentina XCMDb2 Released
A press release of interest to MetaCard developers. Anyone building (or contemplating building) applications that require managing more than a few MB of data or that require sophisticated query support should download and try out the demo version of this package. It's a runtime-limited demo (10-minutes per run) and the example program comes with sample data, though unfortunately no tutorial. If you have any questions or download it and can't figure it out, don't hesitate to contact either me or Paradigma Software. This is a key technology for MetaCard developers to have in their arsenal and we need to do what it takes to make sure that it works well. Regards, Scott Valentina XCMDb2 Released ADDS SPEED IMPROVEMENTS AND CROSS PLATFORM FUNCTIONALITY FOR METACARD August 24, 2000. Beaverton, Oregon. Paradigma Software released beta 2 of its Valentina XCMD database product. Valentina XCMD beta 2 adds improvements to increase overall stability and speed for users of the Macintosh database plug-in. In addition, VXCMDb2 also introduces a cross-platform solution for users of MetaCard Corporation's MetaCard development tool for Macintosh and Windows. Valentina XCMD works with any Macintosh "card" scripting tool, including Apple's HyperCard, IncWell SuperCard, and MetaCard. Third parties have also created a special wrapper for using Valentina XCMD with Userland's Frontier web scripting tool. Valentina XCMD is based on the Valentina database kernel, an ultra-fast database solution for software developers. Valentina solutions are available for REAL Software's REALbasic, Macromedia Director, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Microsoft C++ and Purity Software's WebSiphon. Valentina Server, a cross-platform multi-user server, is slated for release in Q1 2001. Valentina XCMDb2 is available for purchase for $199 or $299 for cross platform support for MetaCard. Users of DASWorks Jovis are eligible for a competitive upgrade discount of $100 off the regular price. Customers who purchase the beta version will also be able to use their license with the final released version. The products are available for immediate download from Paradigma Software or its authorized distributors in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. About Paradigma Software Paradigma Software developed the ultra-fast Valentina database kernel, the core of its line of database products for designers and developers. Founded in 1998 by Ruslan Zasukhin, Paradigma Software has teamed with US-based Proactive International, LLC for international business development. For additional information, visit the Paradigma Software website at http://www.paradigmasoft.com. Contact Paradigma Software [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.paradigmasoft.com ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Try errorNum
On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, David Bovill wrote: What are the values returned to "catch erorrNum"? try send pigeon to the target catch errorNum answer "Error" errorNum finally -- do something end try It's a list of errors found, with each line starting with 3 items (numbers) followed by a fourht item (the name of the handler with an error). I think the first items are something like line numbers in the script - anyone know? The first number is the error number, the second and third are the line and column in the script, and the fourth is the token that was being processed when the error occured. Note that the first number can be converted to an English string using the list of errors in the Execution Error stack, but that the numbers (and the English versions of the errors) change from release to release so you probably shouldn't write scripts that depend on particular values unless you're willing to change (or at least check) them each time you upgrade. Regards, Scott **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Re: Sound level for a QT movie...
On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, David Bovill wrote: YOu can't from Metacard, yet as I was told, but you can do this. Use QT player 4 - professional and go to sound volume and adjust it there. The volume of your QT movie will be lower now than the rest of your other sound, movie files. Wow! Anyone know of a way around this? Perhaps I could script selecting and dragging the QT controller? Nope: QT has it's own concept of how events should be handled and there's no way to simulate this from MetaCard or probably even using the raw C API. Scott, mind teeling me when/how high up his feature is on the priority list, or if there is any other way of controlling sound volume (not QT)? This should be available in the next release. Not sure when that will be. For now, setting the global system volume level with the "playLoudness" property is your only option. Regards, Scott PS: Re: the problem previously reported about a gap in looping sounds in the player, it has been established that this is indeed a problem with QT and others have reported it to Apple too, which means that it will probably eventually get fixed... ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Loop Sound
On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: Well it works perfectly in Sound Edit. So most probably it is a Quicktime problem. Not necessarily: there are lots of ways that the problem could still be in the file, or even in Sound Edit. Try it with some other app. Then you need to report this as a bug to the QuickTime group at Apple. MetaCard just makes the QT API call "MCDoAction(theMC, mcActionSetLooping, True)" OK How do I do that. No, that's the QT call MetaCard makes. It's the same call any other app that uses QT would make... Scott Om shanti, Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Loop Sound
On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: Scott wrote: This problem has already been solved: set the looping of player 1 to true start player 1 Regards, Scott I am not sure what you mean by solved. Yes, it loops, but not in the "perfectly true" sense. . .i.e. there is a "hiccup" gap between the end of one loop and the beginning of the next. Then you need to report this as a bug to the QuickTime group at Apple. MetaCard just makes the QT API call "MCDoAction(theMC, mcActionSetLooping, True)" and so if it doesn't work right, the problem is in QuickTime. But I'd check to make very sure that the problem is not that your audio clip has some extra stuff at the start or end of it, which is a far more likely cause of this type of problem. Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Loop Sound
On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Scott Rossi wrote: on whatsoever set the looping of player xxx to true start player xxx end whatsoever should do the trick. If you really want to hear that sound/song for exactly ten times, a bit more tricky scripting with the "send"- command will be necessary. OK, this works, but even with the player set to always buffer, I am getting a few milliseconds break between the loops. ... Anyway to make this smooth? You might try importing the audio clip directly into your stack and then call: play mySound looping On windows, playback may be acceptable. On the Mac (which has less audio support), you're probably better off using an external like SNDChannel. FWIW, I've been messing with audio in MC for a long time. It doesn't matter if your clip can loop seamlessly in a sound editor -- you'll be lucky to achieve this in MC. And even if you do, you'll find that repeatedly editing your stack may eventually disturb some bits deep in the stack that will cause gaps to suddenly appear in your loops. is it because we are reading the file off the disk? No, it's because audio support is still in need of enhancement by the MC folks... This problem has already been solved: set the looping of player 1 to true start player 1 Regards, Scott Regards, Scott __ Scott RossiTactile Media - Multimedia Design Creative Director Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.tactilemedia.com 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 ID Numbers
On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote: Scott Raney wrote: On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Gregory Lypny wrote: I've got a couple of questions about card ID numbers. First, do they start at 1000? If not, what is the lowest number? 1002 Okay, I just gotta ask. One thousand two? Why two? Honest, I tried to ignore this question, but that little spot that hides behind the back of my brain wouldn't let me. Historical accident, I think. We reserved the first 1000 valid ids (1 to 1000) for the standard icons, cursors, patterns, and brushes. So stacks used to start at 1001 when dishing out ids and incremented this value *after* creating an object. Then we changed the behavior of stacks so that their id property was the id of the most recently created object (to simplify the SC converter, as I recall), which pushed everything up by one. Regards, Scott -- Jacqueline Landman Gay| [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Custom hypermedia solutions | http://www.hyperactivesw.com 612.724.1596 | 612.724.1562 - fax Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 ID Numbers
mc On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Gregory Lypny wrote: Hi List Members, I've got a couple of questions about card ID numbers. First, do they start at 1000? If not, what is the lowest number? 1002 Second, if a card is deleted, can its ID number be later reassigned to another newly created card? No: ids are never reused. Regards, Scott Regards, Greg _ Gregory Lypny Associate Professor of Finance Concordia University _ "Take chances, make mistakes!" - Ms Frizzle, The Magic School Bus 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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
On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Richard Gaskin wrote: 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? 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. Regards, Scott -- 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. **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Re: metacard, internet and security
On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, opus.species wrote: I wrote 2) solution based on limiting the runtime The Navigator, MSIE or javascript have some internal limitations to forbid writing on the user's disk. Would it be possible to have in metatalk some internal flag forbiding a runtime to write on the user's disk but in the folder where the runtime is ? Scott Raney answered Something like this is already in there: Setting the "secureMode" property to true prevents accessing files or running subprocesses on the current system. You can set it to true in a startup handler (once set to true, it can never be set back to false for that session), or on Windows and UNIX, by passing "-f" on the command line. The good news with Metacard is that it is very powerfull :-) The bad news with Metacard is that the documentation is quite cryptic for unix-unliterate scripters who do not exactly know what a "file system" or a "subprocess" look like :-( The doc says : "When the secureMode is set to true, all access to the file system and other system resources is disabled. Once set to true, it cannot be reset back to false." What does mean "all access to the file system ... is disabled" ? Does it mean that you can neither read nor write from/to your disk / local network / internet ? Yes. Does it mean only that a "securemode" runtime cannot write to disk ? Yes. Does it mean also that a "securemode" stack cannot be saved ? Yes. Does it mean also that a "securemode" runtime cannot open an external stack ? No: this is the one exception to the rule. Does it mean also that a "securemode" runtime cannot read data from disk ? Yes. Does it mean also that a "securemode" runtime cannot put into an url ? I can put into an "http://" url, but not to a "file:" url. Does it mean also that a "securemode" runtime cannot get an url ? No, it only applies to the local system. What does mean "all access to ... other system resources is disabled" ? I guess this just means you can't use the Registry on Windows... Does it mean that a "securemode" runtime cannot print ? No. Does it mean also that a "securemode" runtime cannot send an email ? No, you can still do this using sockets. What mean "Setting the secureMode property to true prevents ...running subprocesses" ? Does it mean that a "securemode" runtime cannot use the "launch" or "open process" command ? Exactly. Does it mean that a "securemode" runtime cannot open a substack ? No. Those are all loaded with the main stack anyway... Scott Regards, Claude Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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, internet and security
On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, opus.species wrote: As most people on this list i downloaded and tested the portal of Sivakatirswami. That's a great job ! Until now, the "computer based training" solutions where based on java (cf toolbook) or shockwave or flash. It was difficult to program and/or heavy to download. Sivakatirswami's solution is light, powerful and elegant. But we have now to consider the security... A *.mc app can do anything : destroy all the data of a computer, use a computer to destroy all the data on a network, ... Just like any email message sent to a person using an unpatched version of Microsoft Outlook! Indeed, the latest exploits don't even require you to *read* the message, let alone open an attachment... We have to protect our customers against : - downloading a utility and misusing it - downloading a bugged and dangerous mc file - downloading some mc-based virus If you're even in the least bit concerned about this, you'd have to include "don't use any Microsoft products, including their OSs" to your list ;-) I can think of 2 kind of solutions : 1) solution based on signature The programmer put his signature in his runtime and in his stacks. When opening a stack, the runtime checks if the stack has the right signature. The process could be a "compress+encrypt" function built in the engine and a "decompress+decrypt" function build in the runtime. I'm not sure what this gets you: all this guarantees is that people know where the files originated, not what they do. 2) solution based on limiting the runtime The Navigator, MSIE or javascript have some internal limitations to forbid writing on the user's disk. Would it be possible to have in metatalk some internal flag forbiding a runtime to write on the user's disk but in the folder where the runtime is ? Something like this is already in there: Setting the "secureMode" property to true prevents accessing files or running subprocesses on the current system. You can set it to true in a startup handler (once set to true, it can never be set back to false for that session), or on Windows and UNIX, by passing "-f" on the command line. Regards, Scott **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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.
Animated GIFs (was Re: can't save stack?)
On Sat, 12 Aug 2000 Michaael Walas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While I'm at it, I have some animated gifs that display fine in MetaCard on Windows 98 (Via Virtual PC on a G4) but won't display properly on MacOS system 9, MetaCard 2.3.1 The gifs are "optimized" but Windows MetaCard can display them.and the Mac MetaCard can't (properly). The gifs display properly on the Mac in the shareware program gifbuilder. Do I have to take apart the gifs and reassemble them as "unoptimized" to get them to play on the Mac in MetaCard? I'm talkin' 75-100 animations so that doesn't sound like something I want to do. Just a followup on this: He followed Kevin's advice and sent us the GIF files. The "optimization" technique used on these images is really a bastardization of the GIF format: it uses the transparency mask to store color information rather than what it was intended for. While this sometimes results in smaller files, the animations must always be rectangular and you can't move them while they're playing. We put a hack in the engine to deal with this type of image awhile back (set the "constantMask" property of the image to true), but I recommend avoiding this type of "optimization" unless file size is the #1 concern in your application. Regards, Scott ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: User defined commands and the local variable it...
On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, David Bovill wrote:
A number of built in commands both set the variable it, and return something to the
result function (such as "Cancel"). Is there a way of defining your own handler to do
the same thing?
An example might help:
on extractQuoted someText
local textFound
put "^.*" kwote("(.*)") ".*" into quoteReg
if matchText(someText, quoteReg, textFound) is false then
set it to textFound
return empty
else
set it to empty
return "Not found"
end if
end extractQuoted
This way I can use the same handler to destinguish between finding something that is
empty and "not finding it" - by checking the result.
Sorry, "it" is a local variable and so you can't return a value in
it. There are several of other ways to return values, though. From
worst to best:
1) use a global variable
2) use a custom property on some object (e.g., the one with the handler)
3) use call-by-reference parameters. Using your example:
on extractQuoted someText, @returnedtext
put "^.*" kwote("(.*)") ".*" into quoteReg
if matchText(someText, quoteReg, returnedtext)
then return empty
else return "Not found"
end extractQuoted
You'd call it like:
local myfoundtext
extractQuoted "some string", myfoundtext
if the result is empty
then put myfoundtext into field 1
Even better probably would be to make your handler a function, which
makes the calling script even shorter:
local myfoundtext
if extractQuoted("some string", myfoundtext)
then put myfoundtext into field 1
The only tricky part when using call-by-reference parameters is that
you have to be sure to declare them before you pass them to another
handler.
Regards,
Scott
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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Re: Standalone
On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, andu wrote: Hello, would someone, please, provide me with instructions on how to access the scripts of a standalone, I know how to do it in SuperCard with ResEdit (on Mac), but when I try to change Type (=APPL) to MSTK and Creator (=MSTD) to MCRD, I am still not able to open it. Open it in a text editor like BBEdit. Or Emacs. But note that if the stack used to build the standalone was password protected you're hosed because there's no way to get the scripts back in that case. Regards, Scott Regards, Andu ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Rant
On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Scott Rossi wrote: OK, I'm sitting at home working on a proposal for a client that will involve some multimedia development in MC. It should be a nice little project, a holiday greeting disc from a winery and an online music company. Part of the project will involve superimposing some elegant antialiased typography on top of suitable holiday images. After contemplating the methods available to achieve this effect, it occurs to me that the most efficient way to pull this off would be to overlay masked images of the type on top of the holiday images, so both type and image could be swapped and animated at will. But once again, reality dawns and I go through the old ritual of banging my head against the wall because I realize I'm going to have to build all the imagery as animated GIFs. If only MC supported object translucency, I wouldn't have to jump through hoops every time I do this type of project. Meanwhile, the MetaCard slogan, nay, rallying cry, keeps echoing through my head: "There's a better way to do that." I'm still waiting for that better way. I can think of two of them: 1) use a Mac (inks *are* supported there) 2) use Flash, either by itself or in a player object with QT. We are planning to add support for ink effects, but at least at first this would only work for images. Doing it for text, let alone anti-aliased text, would be an order of magnitude more difficult and so is not even in the realm of possibility for the foreseeable future. Unless of course you can convince Microsoft to build this into the Win32 API, in which case you'll have it right away ;-) Regards, Scott Regards, Scott __ Scott RossiTactile Media - Multimedia Design Creative Director Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.tactilemedia.com ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Purging Open Stacks?
On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Peter Reid wrote: On 8/8/00 4:01 pm, Peter Reid [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks Kevin. Can I just check what you mean by the above. The support stacks I'm using are all in their own separate *.mc files and designated as 'mainstacks', and they all have destroy stack window set. If they are mainStacks and don't have any open substacks, then just closing (or of course deleting!) them should do the trick. With the 'close' command? If the user closes a stack by clicking into the window box, it leaves the stack in the state that leads to the purge dialog?? It shouldn't, at least if it's a main stack with no substacks and you've set its destroyStack property to true. How should I close them such that they fully disappear, but can be reopened at any time with either 'modeless path/stack.mc' type command - or any other sensible way of opening them? I don't want to save anything in these support stacks - they are used for printing and displaying on-screen help. They are outside the main stacks I'm developing so they can be shared between them rather than repeat them within each main CBT stack. You should ask yourself if you really need to remove these stacks from memory at all. If you have enough and/or your needs are not that great, its often best to leave stacks in memory after closing so they load faster next time. If I just let them stay in memory and then try opening them with 'modeless', I get the purge message I was having trouble with. How do I open a stack that may be in memory already or may not have been opened yet in a way such that I don't get the 'purge' dialog appearing? Is the trick to close them in some special way, i.e. not by the user simply clicking on the close window box? There's something else going on here: you should never get that dialog if you just reopen the same stack, regardless of whether it is retained in memory or not. When you *do* get it is when you try to open a stack that has the same name but a different file name. The most likely cause of this is using two different paths to get to the stack (are you changing the directory property at any point?), but setting the fileName property of the stack can also cause it, as can downloading a stack via HTTP and then using "save as" to save it to disk. Regards, Scott Cheers Peter -- Peter Reid Reid-IT Limited, Loughborough, Leics., UK Tel: +44 (0)1509 268843 Fax: +44 (0)870 052 7576 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.reidit.co.uk 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: traceStack property???
On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, David Bovill wrote: Noticed this in the script of the messagebox, and can't find it in the hel index. "set defaultStack to the traceStack" Anyone know what this property is? The traceStack is the stack currently being debugged with the Script Debugger. This property and several other properties and messages the debugger uses are not documented because no normal application should be messing with them and they'll likely change or be eliminated in future releases. Documenting them would imply some promise to retain backward compatibility, which would limit our options for building an improved debugger. Regards, Scott ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Is it a way to catch keyboard events in linux console-mode using backgrounder .mt scripts ?
On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Pierre Sahores wrote: The question is in the header ! Pretty long subject: Re: Is it a way to catch keyboard events in linux console-mode using backgrounder .mt scripts ? The answer is a qualified no. Kind of the whole point of background scripts is that they *don't* do this. How would the user know that their keypresses were going to an app they couldn't see? The "qualified" part is that you could run another application using shell() or open process that could do this and return the result to your script. Regards, Scott Thank's for the help. Pierre Sahores WEB, DB, B2B ASP design. There are countries where people have six fingers because they don't know the metric system. Sir Jean Yanne ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Inline images...
On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, David Bovill wrote: Did I dream this, or did someone mention that it is now possible to embed images in a text field (assume with the htmlText stuff)??? Must have been a dream, or maybe time travel: We *are* working on this, but it isn't available in the current 2.3.1 release... Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: 16 bit sound in MetCard on the Mac
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, J. Scott Saults wrote: When I tried importing 16 bit, 44k sounds into a MetCard stack as WAVE files, playback on a Macintoish was just noise. The same files converted to 8 bit WAVE files played OK. The same files converted to 16 bit AIFF files also played OK. Does this mean that MetaCard on the Mac cannot play imported 16 bit WAVE files? Is this also true for MetCard for Windows? What version of MetaCard are you using? There were problems with some 16-bit WAV files in previous releases, but we don't know of any problems like this with 2.3.1. If you're using 2.3.1, please email one of the sound files you're having trouble with to [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is the best 16 bit sound format for MetaCard for Mac and Windows OS compatibility? AIFF. Also note that the data in some sound files is compressed and that the MetaCard "play" command doesn't support playback of these files on any platform. You might be able to use the player object to play them with QuickTime, however. Regards, Scott Thanks. -- J. Scott Saults, Ph.D. Research Associate Department of Psychology University of Missouri-Columbia Columbia, MO 65211 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Downloaded Movies and Sounds in Memory?
On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: I am posting this again with a proper subject line: re space available for undestroyed stack and files downloaded into the cache what about movies and sounds?: Unfortunately this depends on the platform. Windows 95/98 uses the regular file system,. . . . Some OSs will notify the user when swap space is getting low, some don't. But as a general rule, you should probably just not be wasteful and then don't worry about it. OK, then I suppose 2 meg of stacks in memory is probably a reasonable limit for most machines these days. 2) is the space available for undestroyed stacks in MC's heap space or only limited by available RAM? There's no point in keeping the cached version of the URL around once you've opened a stack. You should "unload" the cached copy immediately after opening the stack. What about movies and sounds? If you download a quicktime movie with sound only and no images (one way we like to play sounds because you have control over the position of the sound, at least do in Supercard), load it into a player object then unload the URL. . .will the movie/sound track still be available to play after you unload the URL? i.e is the sound/movie file held in memory just like a stack that still exists in the mainstacks? You can't play sound and movie files from memory or directly from an HTTP server, nor can you use a player as a container like you can an image. You have to save them to files before you can play them, so this is a non-issue for now. Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Open Closed Stack Still in Memory
On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: on 7/17/00 9:10 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you sure the destroyStack of that stack is false? I am not getting this behaviour here. Make sure you are trying to load the stack using its short name, not its file path (your script suggested perhaps you weren't using the short name). It should still be in memory so my guess is that you haven't refered to the stack correctly. OK I am embarrassed to say I had the destroyStack checked. . .I must have done than in my "early days" when just getting started and also I was calling the stack by its file name, not it's short name. This leads to two questions: The mainStacks property will tell us all loaded stacks still in memory, whether open or closed. . . . 1) Is there a way to query the memory manager to determine when we are getting "too close" to the edge of available RAM? This is of course only an issue where virtual memory is not on, but in the envisioned "MetaCard World" browser environment we envision, a user could continue his browsing through our "metacard cyberspace" and build up a large number of undestroyed stacks. So how to query the heap space and start destroying stacks when we reach some kind of theoretical limit? Unfortunately this depends on the platform. Windows 95/98 uses the regular file system, so you can just do a "dir" and get the free space. On NT, you have to make a system call to find out how much swap space remains. On Linux the file "/proc/meminfo" has this information in it, and any normal user can read that file. On some other UNIX systems, only setuid root programs can get this information. Some OSs will notify the user when swap space is getting low, some don't. But as a general rule, you should probably just not be wasteful and then don't worry about it. 2) is the space available for undestroyed stacks in MC's heap space or only limited by available RAM? Those are the same things except on MacOS when you disable MetaCard's use of temporary memory. One could of course create a cache directory on the users hard drive and start saving stack there transparently, . . .but that is another story to be told later. This is a good idea if you'll be downloading a lot of stuff, and especially if you want to preserve information across sessions rather than downloading a new copy each time. Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: systemFileSelector vs Metacard File Selector
On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: We see there is the option to set a property called the systemFileSelector What are criteria/issues are involved in making a decision to set this to true or to use the Metacard File selector? The only reason I can think of for using the stack version of the File Selector would be if you'd modified it (e.g., to show a preview of a selected file or something). Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: POST
On Sat, 15 Jul 2000, David Bovill wrote: Thanks again Andu... From: andu [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 12:42:34 -0400 (EDT) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: POST This is what the server receives from the same form but using GET.: GET /?Field-user=anduSubmit=SubmitField-pass=also-andu/ HTTP/1.0 Connection: Keep-Alive User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 (Macintosh; I; PPC) Host: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */* Accept-Encoding: gzip Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8 but I meant what does the server see following a standard Metacard post/get operation as compared to the above examples from Netscape. and also what Metacard's built in "post" and "get = get url someurl?someparams". That would give a complete picture... get url "http://www.metacard.com" ; put it post "I should read the docs first" to url "the_url.com" I'd like to see what the standard http headers that Metacard sends with these commands and how they can be changed/overridden. Thanks a bundle. NB. Scott if your reading (as ever), is there really no documentation at all on httpheaders property? Do you get this sort of stuff here form the list, or is there any other form of more extensive documentation you can get hold of (naturally at a price?) I think you're expecting too much: the httpHeaders property is empty by default, and you'll find documentation about what you can put in there by reading the HTTP protocol RFCs. By default MetaCard just includes the first line and a "Content-Length:" header. Putting some of the others (particularly the Host: header) wouldn't be a bad idea, depending what HTTP server you're trying to connect to. Regards, Scott **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Post...
On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, David Bovill wrote: Can anyone help? I'm trying to simulate a browser posting a form to a CGI. Forms can either use the "get" or "post" method. How do I implement these in MetaCard? They are already implemented: a "get" is just referring to the URL as you would any container, and "post" is done with the "post" command. The urlEncode() and urlDecode() functions are also frequently useful when doing this kind of thing. Regards, Scott Thanks ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Digest metacard.v003.n427 (really was Re: buggy drivers)
On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, John Burtt wrote: In response to my Transparent GIF question, Kevin Miller wrote: ...Are you using the very latest build of MetaCard on NT? I'm currently using Build #7 of Version 2.3.1, but the stand-alone was built a couple of builds ago. Can't tell exactly which one. If you're using the latest engine and you have a reproducable of the problem please send a copy of the image to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Done. And Scott Raney wrote: Sounds like a driver bug, a problem which is astoundingly (and annoyingly) common on Win32 systems. Check the WWW site of the vendor of the graphics card and make sure you have the latest drivers. If that doesn't fix the problem, open the Display control panel and set acceleration to its lowest level. This will force the driver to use software to do the drawing rather than the hardware, which eliminates these problems in all cases we know of. I realize that I should try this in order to find the cause of the problem but I don't have a machine running NT of my own. I was demonstrating my program for a potential customer on their machine. It just doesn't seem right to tell them their machine needs updating. It would seem to me that if I advertise that my application will run on NT, it should do just that, whether their machine has the latest upgrades or not. Ha! If only the world were such a perfect place. Actually your belief that it should just work would be justified if you were distributing your work only on UNIX workstations, or for the most part on Macs. But Windows is a whole 'nother can of worms. I still can't figure out why when people buy a Yugo and "save" lots of money that it's obvious to everyone that they've been had, yet when people buy some piece of crap PC with a 2 dollar graphics chip soldered onto the motherboard that people think they got a good deal. For example, last week I helped debug a problem where a program wouldn't install on a friend's PC because it required 64MB RAM, but that system only had 62MB, according to Windows. 62 MB?!?!? Couldn't figure that one out until I opened it up and found that it didn't even have a graphics card and was using system memory for the frame buffer! The time we wasted just on that one problem was worth vastly more than the 50 bucks it would have cost to outfit the system with a decent graphics card in the first place. WRT cheap PCs that have no-name graphics chips with poorly written drivers, we developers are basically in the position of being stuck behind a broken down Yugo on the highway. There ain't a whole hell of a lot we can do until they either get out of the way, or fix the thing so that it works again. I wouldn't lose any sleep over the suffering of the "drivers" of these PCs: they're used to things not working and requiring them to make special efforts to run your program isn't an unreasonable request. Thanks for your help. I think I will begin re-designing my application without Gif's containing transparent backgrounds. At least untill I can get this figured out. Unless you're sure that upgrading the driver on that NT box won't fix the problem, I'd recommend against this approach. Crippling your application to make it work on buggy systems is roughly akin to lowering the highway speed limit to 30 mph so that the Yugos out there won't have to work so hard to keep up ;-) Regards, Scott PS: He sent me the image, and as expected it worked fine on my NT box. Mine has an ATI card in it, and while ATI has shipped their fair share of buggy drivers (including the ones on the Windows 98 distribution CD), they always *eventually* seem to get it right... PPS: Watch out! I heard they're making Yugos again! John **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Screen artifacts with player
On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Hugh Senior wrote: This may or may not be video-driver related, but any window in which an active player controller is displayed invariably gets splattered with artifacts from other windows at the drop of a hat, until a screen refresh. Kevin and Scott have both mentioned reducing acceleration in the Windows control panel and ensuring up-to-date drivers. So... Would someone be kind enough to explain where/how to do these in NT? I cannot see anything in the control panels and am unable to locate either of them in the NT on-line help. What am I meant to be looking for? It depends on the graphics card driver, but this setting will appear in the "Display" control panel if available. But reports of graphics-card related problems are very rare on NT. Not sure whether that's just because of the much smaller installed base, better quality drivers, or just the fact that NT doesn't even support the very low-end graphics chips/cards that tend to have these problem on Windows 95/98. But, your problem doesn't sound like a driver problem. It's more likely a problem with QT, with MetaCard, or with some interaction between the two. My guess would be the former, because QT doesn't work so hot on NT because it makes way too many assumptions about being able to monopolize system resources (e.g., like any good OS, NT punishes processes when they seem to be sucking up CPU time for no good reason, something QT does a lot). As always, if you've got a reproducible example, and especially if it happens on both NT and 95/98, by all means send in a report to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regards, Scott /H Hugh Senior The Flexible Learning Company Consultant Programming Software Solutions Fax/Voice: +44 (0)1483.27 87 27 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.flexibleLearning.com 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Screen artifacts with player
On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Geoff Canyon wrote: Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] said, on 7/4/00 10:11 AM: like any good OS, NT punishes processes when they seem to be sucking up CPU time for no good reason, something QT does a lot I'm just curious, how does QT suck up CPU time for no good reason, and how can the OS tell the difference between real work and makework? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just curious--presumably QT isn't issuing endless strings of NOPs, so how could NT, or any OS, watch what QT, or any program, was doing and say, "that program isn't doing anything useful--it's just shuffling those same chunks of data back and forth repeatedly. And that sort algorithm could have been written much more efficiently; I'll punish it!" It's not so smart as that, it just does something simple like measure the percentage of its allotted CPU time a process uses between calls it makes to the OS (at which point the process does the equivalent of the Roberts Rules "I yield the balance of my time to whoever's next"). If it always uses up its full quota, the OS will compensate by giving it smaller time slices or giving it slices less often to ensure that other programs running on the system remain responsive. QT gets penalized for two reasons: 1) it bypasses the OS whenever it can (which may explain why forcing it to use GDI calls makes it work better on NT because this ties it closer to the OS) and 2) it starts its own thread that does stuff like polling the main event queue instead of doing it the nice way by just waiting for an event. To some extent both of these practices are justified for a time-critical library like QT. But Apple's got some tuning to do to make it work better on NT (and probably on UNIX, at least in its Mac OS X guise) where the rules are different than on single-user systems like MacOS and Windows 95/98. Another thing that might be worth trying would be to change the "performance boost for the foreground application" slider in the system control panel. I'm just speculating, but this may be a way to make NT go a little easier on the punishment it dishes out to CPU hogs like QT ;-) Regards, Scott Geoff "striving to learn more than his due about modern OSes" Canyon **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 2.3.1 released
MetaCard 2.3.1 is now available in the directory ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard. If you need a little help finding the right files, you can also download them using the WWW page http://www.metacard.com/get.html. Many thanks to all of you who participated in the beta and gamma test phases. Your efforts have greatly improved the quality of the product and we look forward to working with you again in the future! Regards, Scott PS: To those who downloaded gamma-test versions, this is buildNumber 7. Please check to make sure you got the last one... Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 ;-))
On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Dominique Delefortrie wrote:
Suppose I want to output the content of a bg fld to a TEXT file (Mac OS)
Or only the content of fields belonging to marked cards.
I am obtaining an empty file...
AS to explain myself, this is the script:
on mouseup
ask file "Fichier de sortie :" with "Sortie xNotes"
if it is empty then exit mouseup
put it into laSortie
open file laSortie
go next
put number of marked cds into cartes
write recuperation(cartes) to file laSortie
close file laSortie
#open laSortie with "Tex-Edit Plus F" -- doesn't work with MC
This should work, though you have to specify "open process" or
"launch" and you do need the full path to the program. Tuv Snyder's
externals package as a function that returns this.
Also note that you could simplify this whole process using a URL:
put recuperation(cartes) into url ("file:" laSortie)
end mouseup
===
and in the card script:
==
function recuperation x
put empty into larecup
put return "" return into sep1
put return
"---
-" return into sep2
repeat x times
go next marked cd
put bg fld "letitre" sep1 bg fld "letexte" sep2 after larecup
end repeat
I think you're missing a "return larecup" here...
end recuperation
=
With HyperCard (HC) there were only script -- I was obliged to cut the
script in order to respect the 10 lines limit ;-)
Where is (are ;-)) the ERRORs ?
TIA, DD
PS: The 2.3 version is very appealing -- after a certain adaptation time ;-))
Above the rest, I do appreciate the COLOR treatment (compared to HC)
domi (-8
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: Keyup and keydown
On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote: Dave Cragg wrote: It seems to work differently on Windows (on NT anyway). KeyUps and rawKeyUps get sent even without an active field. A series rawKeyUps and rawKeyDowns get sent when the key is depressed for a long time, matching the normal key repeat rate. This happens on cards with no controls of any kind. All keys seem to get detected, including the shift key. Is this a Mac limitation or perhaps a bug in the Mac engine? I did more tests which show that it works that way here on my Mac too -- keyups and downs are being sent to a card without any fields. (My previous tests were flawed.) One exception seems to be the shift key, which is what I really want to use. Shift doesn't seem to be detected. There are some other keys which aren't being detected either on my Mac, mostly control keys like control, command, and option. This is just a MacOS "feature": unlike the other platforms, it doesn't send events when these modifier keys are pressed. Even the keyUp message is a hack on MacOS, due to a design flaw deep inside the OS: if there's a context switch (i.e., another program gets a chance to run) between when the key is pressed and when it is released, the "up" event sometimes gets sent to that other program! So what the MacOS engine actually does is to send the keyUp message at the end of the keyDown event handler :-( Regards, Scott -- Jacqueline Landman Gay| [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Custom hypermedia solutions | http://www.hyperactivesw.com 612.724.1596 | 612.724.1562 - fax **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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
On Wed, 21 Jun 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it possible to set up a hot-key that is available regardless of which window is active or even if no window is active (all windows hidden)? My app communicates with another computer via RS-232 and sometimes there is no active window displayed (only the backdrop showing) during the normal course of operation. It would be nice to still be able to map a key or keys to special actions (bring up a particular window or quit MC, for example). There are hooks in all three supported GUI architectures to do this, but MetaCard doesn't provide any access to them and so you'd have to use an external to do this kind of thing. You also have to be very careful when writing an external that uses these hooks because they're about the best way there is to completely disable your system ;-) Regards, Scott Larry Huisingh Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Script profiler use
On Mon, 19 Jun 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I tried to use the script profiler in the debugger on the Win32 platform (both 2.3 and 2.3.1 Gamma). I selected the script and selected "Start Profile". I then ran the script by clicking on the button in my stack that ultimately called the script I was wanting to profile. When the script was done there were two columns in the "Script" area labeled "# calls" and "Time:" but there were no numbers in the columns except for a 0 that always showed up in the top line of the "Time:" column. Am I doing something wrong? I even tried using the "Send Message" button in the debugger window and got the same results although the script ran at near normal speed whereas using my stack button it took much, much, much longer than normal. Seems to work fine here. Either the handler you're tracing is not being called like you think it is, or the script debugger is not tracing in the object your handler is in. This can be difficult to determine if your handler is in a front/back or "start using" script, so be sure that you turn all of that off and the stack the script is in is open. If you still can't get it to work after simplifying the environment, please send a bug report to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regards, Scott Larry Huisingh Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Backdrop is behind other program
On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am using MC for Win32 running on WinNT as well as Win98. I have a backdrop set for my application. If I bring up WordPad and then click on one of my MC windows I can still see the WordPad window. Nothing short of minimizing the WordPad window will hide the other applications. I assumed the backdrop would hide all non-MC windows as long as MC was in the foreground. Am I doing something wrong? Maybe just assuming that you can run other applications while a MetaCard application has a backdrop set. This isn't supported. Fighting the natural window stacking behavior of the OS is a nightmare as it is without opening yet another can of worms by requiring that sometimes other app's windows appear above the backdrop and sometimes below... Regards, Scott Larry Huisingh Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: telnet decoding
On 15 Jun 2000, Miel wrote: if I connect to a telnet platform (let's say "www.telnet.org" with port "telnet" it connects as usual. I set the script so it reads from a socket called tFtpSock whenever the stack is idle and puts it into a field named: "main". after I connect, I get something like this: ÿýÿý ÿý#ÿý' can I decode this into plain text? and if I can HOW? You probably can't, because it's probably not text. I'm not very familiar with the Telnet protocol, but it's more likely that data is control codes that exchange information between client and server about terminal types or protocol version or something like that. You'd have to read the Telnet RFC to get some idea what the protocol requires and then either just ignore that stuff and tell the server what it wants to hear, or decode it using binaryDecode() or maybe just charToNum(). If you need any help or encouragement to take on this project, let me know: we've wanted to see an example telnet implementation for a long time but haven't found anyone willing to take it on (one look at the RFC and you may run away too ;-) Regards, Scott regards, Miel -=[MieL]=- ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 2.3.1 gamma
The gamma (final) test release of MetaCard 2.3.1 for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux is now available in the directory: ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.1/ Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Set Colors as Hex Values
On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: Is it possible to set the colors of objects, background, foreground, borders etc. in MC as web rgb hex values? viz #80 (soft yellow) Anyone into color don't miss http://member.nifty.ne.jp/marimari/iro/zukan.htm for a fabulous color design resource. We can of course translate all these hexValues back into RGB and then manually set them in the color palette for any given object eg. the above yellow being 255,255,80 but I was wondering if there would be a more direct route. Did you actually *try* this before posting? Probably not, because if you had you would have found that it just works... Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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
On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Richard Gaskin wrote: 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? Seems to me that'd it'd take just a few minutes to build a function like this, so it's kind of hard to get worked up about it. The only hard part is returning a value from the function because currently only the modal command supports the kind of blocking necessary to do this. But in most cases this would just be bad UI design: I can't think of any situation where I'd *want* to open a popup in the middle of a handler and then do stuff after the popup closed instead of just having a different handler called when the user made a choice from the popup. For example, you could just put a menuPick message handler in the original target and then send it a message from the popup stack. Regards, 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: How to detect error in Set Directory
On Wed, 7 Jun 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm using your work-around, but I'd sure like something better. That work-around has two major problems: 1) The error message I usually get is "Can't open directory." This is a legal directory name! I can catch some but not all errors this way. 2) This makes a lot of assumptions about what MetaCard's doing, and what I'm doing. Change the statement to 'get commonDir() "/" userName();set the directory to it;answer the result'. Now, on success, the result will be userName(), not the value of 'it'. So I need to know a lot of history (and the order in which MetaCard executes the two functions) to determine what's an error. At a bare minimum this behavior needs to be documented. I spent a lot of time fighting this because: 1) 'set the directory to "my simple command line example" works differently from 'set the directory to myRealFunctionWhichIsNotVisibleToTheCommandLine()"' so I couldn't see what was going on. 2) 'Answer the result' clears the result (always, it can't return a value or an error), which made me think that 'set the directory' was clearing the result from the previous call to 'set the directory' 3) I can't find any discussion of what does and does not clear the result. (i.e. answer always set it to empty, set the directory only sets it on error, get/put never changes it.) Well, at least you need to know that "ask" and "answer" are just stacks, and so opening them causes handlers to be executed. The fact that the result is cleared at the end of a handler *is* documented. As a general rule, you should always check or save the result away in the statement immediately following any command that may set it. The doc should advise that you do this. Regards, Scott ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Leston Drake wrote: Can someone repost the URL for downloading 2.3.1 b2? Thanks. Use the archives to find the original announcement: Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/ Leston Drake LetterPress Software, Inc. http://www.lpsoftware.com 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. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Stack Name/File Name Conventions
On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: The reference materials indicate that it is better that the stack name and the name of the file it is saved in be different. By default a newly created stack will save to a file name with the .mc suffix added to the stack name in the stack properties. Question: HACourses (stackname) HACourses.mc (FileName) Good choices... are two different strings taken as literals. . .but, are they different names or the same from the standpoint of MCs behaviour that reopens a stack file by the same name as the stack name? If it can't find a stack already loaded, the engine will look for a file with the same name as the stack, and if that's not found it will then tack on a ".mc" extension and look for a file of that name. The advice to use a different name for the file from the stack is still good, but not as important as it used to be: if you go to stack "HACourses.mc", it will look for a stack in memory loaded from that file and reopen that. It used to just reload that file, which could cause problems. Regards, Scott Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 On PalmPilot?
On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Digifilm wrote: Is MetaCard on PalmOS a future possibility? It's possible. Even likely, if Palm continues to dominate the hand-held market the way it has. But it'd a ways off in the future in any case: current generation handhelds are pretty underpowered to handle a full-blown application like MetaCard and producing a usable subset would be pretty difficult... Regards, Scott Debdoot Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 beta 2 release
On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Christoph Wollek wrote: I tried to download the Mac version. Opening it was denied; I got the message, that the NavigationLib lacks. Thanks for the report: that library should be weak linked, but apparently isn't. For future reference, however, please follow the instructions given in the message footer of every message that appears on this list... Regards, Scott Christoph 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. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 2.3.1 beta 2
MetaCard 2.3.1 beta 2 is now available in the directory ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.1/ This is the last scheduled beta for 2.3.1. As stated in the 2.3.1 beta 1 announcment, a relatively large number of changes have been made for 2.3.1 to improve operation of Cross Worlds' new development environment. If any of them affect your application, speak now or forever hold your piece! Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Fri, 2 Jun 2000, andu wrote: MetaCard 2.3.1 beta 2 is now available in the directory ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.1/ This is the last scheduled beta for 2.3.1. As stated in the 2.3.1 beta 1 announcment, a relatively large number of changes have been made for 2.3.1 to improve operation of Cross Worlds' new development environment. If any of them affect your application, speak now or forever hold your piece! It would be nice to know what changes have been made in order to know what to look for. Some are documented in the README. But we have enough trouble getting people to read that file as it is without hiding the important stuff in pages and pages of mostly insignificant changes, and so we decided to leave out the trivia. You should just run through your normal QA procedure to ensure correct operation of your application. Regards, Scott Regards, Andu Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Leston Drake wrote: The change you made to stackFiles (so you can define them using a relative path from the stack directory) is good. However, if you have set the stackFiles to a fully-qualified path, using the filename of the stack to know where it is, then it doesn't find them. This is a standard workaround for the earlier problem, and I know several people who are doing this. I hope that you can change this so that it is backward compatible in cases where a fully- qualified path is specified. 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... Thanks for the report! Scott Leston Drake LetterPress Software, Inc. http://www.lpsoftware.com Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Craig Spooner wrote: At 7:45 AM -0700 6/1/00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Hugh Senior [EMAIL PROTECTED] Richard wrote: if char len(tFileName)-3 to len(tFileName) ".txt" then put ".txt" after tFileName end if Aaarghhh! Another one for me scrapbook! Yeah, I was thinking the same thing! Thanks Richard. Craig 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 Regards, Scott /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Craig Spooner Instructional Technology Training and Development WebCT Administrator Office of Instructional Services Colorado State University (970) 491-2516 ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: mousecontrol
On Tue, 30 May 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote: Kevin Miller wrote: I think your best bet is probably going to be to alter which handlers you are using to do all of this. You probably want to do something along the lines of using mouseEnter/mouseLeave to change the cursor rather than mouseMove, and consider using either a mouseMove handler with mouseDown/mouseUp/mouseRelease to set a local which tells mouseMove to move or not, or use the "grab me" command in a mouseDown handler. After I posted, I rewrote things to use mouseEnter instead and it was not only better behaved, but faster. So, you're right. That was the way to go. All those "mouseMove" messages were getting in the way of smooth operation. I am about to experiment with "grab" next, because while the user is dragging the object, no other messages need to be sent anyway. So I may as well use "grab", which would probably solve all the problems. Actually there were at least two other things in your script causing the delay, not the mouseMove message per se. The first was changing the cursor in the mouseMove message, changing the cursor being a relatively expensive operation, even compared with redrawing an object in a new location. The second was a parallel loop involving "send .. in" to send a message that polled "the mouse". Both of those are relatively expensive, but especially the latter. Any time you call "the mouse" or "the mouseLoc" or "the controlKey" or any function that involves polling the current state of the system, you've basically decided that doing it the easy way is more important than performance. Same rule applies to using "idle" or "mouseStillDown", which is basically making the engine do your dirty work for you. The fast way (and the right way) to do all of these things is to use the messages and keep track of the state of the mouse and/or the keyboard using variables. It's called event-driven programming, and is the way GUI development was meant to be done. Regards, Scott -- Jacqueline Landman Gay| [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Custom hypermedia solutions | http://www.hyperactivesw.com 612.724.1596 | 612.724.1562 - fax Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: GIF AVI or QuickTime in MetaCard
On Tue, 30 May 2000, Sjoerd Op 't Land wrote:
Op 29-05-2000 21:02 schreef Scott Raney op [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
On Mon, 29 May 2000, Sjoerd Op 't Land wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I want to make a Animated GIF to QuickTime or AVI converter
in MetaCard. Is that possible?
I think quicktime already supports direct import of GIF and AVI
animations.
You are right! I can set the fileName of a player to a GIF file. I only have
trouble with experimenting because when I set the fileName and close the
property's window, a part of the home stack and the browse and arrow tool of
the tools palette turn black. Did I "hit upon a bug"? I have tried locking
the colormap doesn't help. I have a Macintosh Performa 5400/160 with MacOS
N1-8.6.
Yes, if you're in 8-bit (256 color) display mode. Setting it to 16 or
32 bit ("thousands" or "millions) depth will fix the problem, as will
upgrading to 2.3.1 beta.
So you'd only have to do something like
set the filename of player 1 to "picture.gif"
#save to file
Works (except that bug (?)), but how can I save this to a QuickTime or AVI
file? Like this: ?
put player "GIFANIM" into player "AVIANIM"
save player "AVIANIM"
Players can't be used as containers or saved separately than a file.
You can do the first with image objects, though, and can save the data
using the file commands or urls.
Regards,
Scott
So that means I can't make it in MetaCard?
Reading your original question again, the answer to your last question
is "yes": MetaCard isn't a movie editing or image conversion
application so you'll have to find some other program to do this.
Regards,
Scott
Thanks for any reply in advance,
Sjoerd Op 't Land
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Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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: GIF AVI or QuickTime in MetaCard
On Mon, 29 May 2000, Sjoerd Op 't Land wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I want to make a Animated GIF to QuickTime or AVI converter
in MetaCard. Is that possible?
I think quicktime already supports direct import of GIF and AVI
animations.
You are right! I can set the fileName of a player to a GIF file. I only have
trouble with experimenting because when I set the fileName and close the
property's window, a part of the home stack and the browse and arrow tool of
the tools palette turn black. Did I "hit upon a bug"? I have tried locking
the colormap doesn't help. I have a Macintosh Performa 5400/160 with MacOS
N1-8.6.
Yes, if you're in 8-bit (256 color) display mode. Setting it to 16 or
32 bit ("thousands" or "millions) depth will fix the problem, as will
upgrading to 2.3.1 beta.
So you'd only have to do something like
set the filename of player 1 to "picture.gif"
#save to file
Works (except that bug (?)), but how can I save this to a QuickTime or AVI
file? Like this: ?
put player "GIFANIM" into player "AVIANIM"
save player "AVIANIM"
Players can't be used as containers or saved separately than a file.
You can do the first with image objects, though, and can save the data
using the file commands or urls.
Regards,
Scott
Thanks for any help or suggestions,
Sjoerd Op 't Land=
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Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
****
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: color depth problem
On Thu, 25 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I designed my stack in 16 bit on my Mac, but when the monitor is at 256 color, the colors are pretty screwed up. I was expecting the colors to be approximate and or just grainy. I didn't expect to see psychedilic colors pop up. Any clues? Are you using the player object to show QT movies? If so, this is a known problem with 2.3. The problem is fixed in 2.3.1 beta 1, available from ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.1/ Regards, Scott Scott Yang, M.D. Kadena Pediatric Clinic Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Wed, 24 May 2000, Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:
At 5:10 AM -0700 5/23/2000, Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Mon, 22 May 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote:
Then what is value("1+1")? Should it be the string "1+1"? Or the
expected result of 2?
I'd say if it were in quotes, it should be treated as a string literal
and the value should be "1+1". If it isn't in quotes, the value should
be 2.
This is exactly the way MetaCard works. What it doesn't do currently
is pass back the entire string if the evaluation of it as an
expression fails. This will be easy to change to improve
compatibility, but is really an abuse of the value() function, which
even in the HyperCard documentation is specified to work on
*expressions*, not arbitrary strings of characters.
A string considered as an arbitrary string of characters *is* an
expression, though, albeit the simplest type of expression, one that
consists of a single factor. String is a data type, after all, and that
makes
"This is a string"
as much an expression as
true
or
17
Even if you don't try to go inside the quotes to evaluate its content.
A quoted string definitely is an expression, but an *unquoted* string,
which is what Jacque was trying to use, is not. An expression is
composed of factors (single words) connected together with operators,
and the space character is not an operator.
Just for the curious, the comma is an operator in MetaTalk but not in
HyperTalk. This is to allow for things like:
set the backgroundColor of button 1 to 255,0,0 -- RGB for "red"
This would work in HyperCard too (at least, if it supported color ;-)
but only because HyperCard takes everything from the last thing it can
parse in a command to the end of a line as one parameter. This is a
hack, is not documented (indeed, is not even possible to document in a
standard BNF syntax chart), and is not implemented in MetaTalk. It's
probably also why the value() function works the way it does in
HyperCard.
I think you can make a case, conceptually, for the value function doing one
more round of parsing on a string literal. But you can make just as good a
case for treating a quoted string as a factor instead - and doing so lets
you do additional things with the value function. Between that and the
compatibility argument, I think Jacque has made the case for changing the
behavior here.
Agreed. But compatibility should have limits, and I'd say this is
already over that line because it violates even the BNF syntax chart
Apple produced for HyperCard. Emulating deviations from their own
specs doesn't seem like a feature to me.
Regards,
Scott
--
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http://www.jaedworks.com
********
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Re: Text chopped off by Print this card
On Tue, 23 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm having some trouble making my printouts look like my screens. I'm just using "Print this card". It works well most of the time. But the text size is slightly different on the printer and on the screen. Does anyone have any hints on how to avoid this problem? My favorite is: Use a UNIX or Macintosh system! They were designed intelligently and don't have this problem. I've got a sample at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/phil/MC_Demo/. The screen snapshot looks good to me. I was hoping for the same thing when I printed it out. The result, which I scanned back in, has one character partially chopped off. On screens with more text, the problem gets worse. It looks like the text is slightly larger on the printed version AND the text is not being centered correctly on that version. On the screen the space between the boxes and the text shows that there is about as much free space on either side of the field. On the printed version, the text on the left side is in the same position, but the text on the right runs outside of the boundaries of the field. I'm working with Windows NT 4.0. The font is Arial, a true type font. The printer is an inkjet from HP. The printer does not know postscript and it does not have its own fonts. I'm using MetaCard 2.3. The other solution is to set the "formatForPrinting" property of the stack to true before printing, then print, then set it back to false. Also note that due to the incredibly buggy in the HP printer drivers (working around problems in which is by far our #1 driver-related waste of time) this doesn't always work. Better operation can be had using the 2.3.1 release, currently in beta test. Be sure the card or stack has a font set, because fonts inherited from another stack (main stack or Home stack) don't change when you set the formatForPrinting property. Regards, Scott PS: While we're on the subject, does anyone know anyone at HP that gives a damn about the quality of their printer drivers? We'd sure like to get MetaCard in their test suite because it seems like every time they come out with a new printer we lose several days of development time trying to work around the bugs in them. **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Mon, 22 May 2000, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote:
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
The value of a string being the same string pretty much defeats the
purpose of having a value function. Why do you need a function that does
nothing?
I use this capability in HyperCard to quickly extract data from within
quoted strings in database exports. I usually don't want quoted literals
to be evaluated. If the quoted string contains commas or other item
delimiters, then it isn't always possible to use the "replace" function
to strip off the commas without screwing up the number of items in the
data. The "value" function, on the other hand, works very well for this
(or it does in HyperCard anyway.)
Suppose one record of my exported data looks like this:
"Jacque","Gay","President, HyperActive Software"
In HyperCard, the value of the last item of the line above is equal to
its string literal, i.e., "President, HyperActive Software". In MC, I
get a fairly random string returned.
Umm, I think this is wrong: HyperCard doesn't pay attention to quotes
in item chunks. It only does this for word chunks.
Then what is value("1+1")? Should it be the string "1+1"? Or the
expected result of 2?
I'd say if it were in quotes, it should be treated as a string literal
and the value should be "1+1". If it isn't in quotes, the value should
be 2.
This is exactly the way MetaCard works. What it doesn't do currently
is pass back the entire string if the evaluation of it as an
expression fails. This will be easy to change to improve
compatibility, but is really an abuse of the value() function, which
even in the HyperCard documentation is specified to work on
*expressions*, not arbitrary strings of characters.
Regards,
Scott
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
HyperActive Software | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Custom hypermedia solutions | http://www.hyperactivesw.com
612.724.1596 | 612.724.1562 - fax
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
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Re: relative paths to media
On Thu, 18 May 2000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: Scott Raney wrote: ... I've seen many stacks that change the current directory to select different sets of images or movies (e.g., to support multiple languages) [snip] using separate *stacks* for the different languages isn't a good design. Hmmm... that's the design I would have used. What is the problem with it, and what would you suggest? It's just a lot of extra work: every time you make one change in the stack, you have to go and make the same change in X other stacks too. Better to use a single stack and change the images/movies/sounds by changing the file reference (e.g., the directory) and text by loading different sets of text files (also possibly e.g. based on the directory) at run time. Regards, Scott -- Steven D'Aprano == M.B. Sales Pty LtdPh: +61 3 9460-5244 A.C.N. 005-964-796Fax: +61 3 9462-1161 Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Wed, 17 May 2000, Phil Davis wrote: Scott Raney wrote: On Wed, 17 May 2000, Phil Davis wrote: Easy now... no one is going to get hurt. This is an idea, not a feature request. We already have: recentCards recentNames lockRecent Would it be useful to have any/all of these: recentDirectories (directories that were "the directory") recentFiles (files that have been opened) recentURLs(HTTP URLs loaded/gotten) There is the cachedUrls() function... recentSockets (list of all connections...) Some or all the above might need locking capability like "lockRecent". What would you use any of these for? It depends. (That's euphemisticSpeak for "I don't know.") Basically I went into "autoGenerate" mode there for a minute. The only thing that occured to me was as a security exploit: for example you could have a little bit of script that uploaded all the connections the user had made. But even this is pretty weak, at least compared with security holes inherent other products (i.e., if *I* were a hacker, I'm sure I could keep myself busy for a lifetime just exploiting the security holes in the various Microsoft products). Regards, Scott -- Phil Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] days: (503) 986-1215 eves: (503) 557-5656 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. **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Thu, 18 May 2000, Richard Gaskin wrote: 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. Right, and it's specific to a document rather than global like the directory. The equivalent would probably be a stack property. 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. Me too. And it'd be relatively safe, both WRT predictability and backward compatibility: If the stack property is set, it would use that, otherwise it would use the current directory. Any suggestions for the name of the property? Regards, 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. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Thu, 18 May 2000, Tuviah Robert wrote:
So it could be used like:
set the relativeDirectory to tUserLanguage
put the files into tMediaAssets
Why not have the directory property list several directories, with MetaCard
searching for files from the first directory to the last.
For example
set the directory(or directories) to
"C:\MetaCard\files"cr:C\MetaCard\Images\"
and when querying the directory is would return a list of directories
Perhaps so that it remains backwards compatible have the "directory"
property return and act on the first line, with another
property("directories") return a complete listing of directories where
MetaCard looks for files and images.
This sounds more like a PATH, in the UNIX use of the word. And while
this kind of thing works fine when looking for a single executable, it
gets a little more fuzzy when you try to apply it to media files
because it's a lot more likely that you're going to have multiple
files around with the same names. Something like the BASE HTML tag
seems like a better idea to me because it doesn't have this ambiguity
problem.
Regards,
Scott
regards,
Tuviah
********
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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Re: mouseclicks outside of windows are lost
On Wed, 17 May 2000, Richard Gaskin wrote: 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? 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? 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. Regards, 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 Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Wed, 17 May 2000, Phil Davis wrote: Easy now... no one is going to get hurt. This is an idea, not a feature request. We already have: recentCards recentNames lockRecent Would it be useful to have any/all of these: recentDirectories (list of all directories that have been "the directory") recentFiles (list of all files that have been opened) recentURLs(list of all HTTP URLs that have been loaded/gotten) There is the cachedUrls() function... recentSockets (list of all connections that have been accepted?/opened?) Some or all the above might need locking capability like "lockRecent". What would you use any of these for? Scott Phil **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Wed, 17 May 2000, Kevin Miller wrote: On 17/5/00 5:41 pm, Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You need to set the directory property of the stack to on preOpenStack to match its fileName. I think there is a good argument for making relative paths (images, players) work like stackFiles has just been changed to work: i.e. relative to the fileName rather than the current directory? Scott? 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... Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Windows CE?
On Wed, 17 May 2000, David Bovill wrote: Wouldn't it be lovely... Would it? From what I can tell, CE is dead meat and even Microsoft apparently planning to start over with something more Palm-like. The most recent Consumer Reports was yet another nail in the coffin of the CE market: the Palm and Psion products thoroughly whipped the CE-based products. Regards, Scott From: Kevin Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 09 May 2000 10:23:20 +0100 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Windows CE? On 9/5/00 9:41 am, Jarno Järvenpää [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, does MetaCard run on WinCE? No. Kevin -Jarno Järvenpää Kevin Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.xworlds.com/ Cross Worlds Computing, MetaCard Distributors, Custom Development. Tel: +44 (0)131 672 2909. Fax: +44 (0)1639 830 707. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 2.3.1 beta 1
MetaCard 2.3.1 beta 1 is now available in the directory ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard/2.3.1/ This release is primarily a bug fix release, but there are some new features too, most notably support for Navigation Services in the MacOS engine. See the file README.2.3.1 for details. Also, a relatively large number of changes have been made to improve operation of Cross Worlds' new development environment and there are some possible backward-compatibility issues. We recommend testing your application with this release at your earliest convenience so that we can address any of these issues in a timely manner. The MacOS, Win32, and Linux engines have been built for this release. Let me know if you'd like to test it on some other platform. Regards, Scott Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: HTML tables
On Mon, 15 May 2000, rice wrote: I created a table in an HTML editor. I copied the script to a file. In a MC script I open the file and copy it to a MC HTML field. No table. Is this the way it's supposed to be or have I screwed up? MetaCard fields don't support tables. This is on the feature-request list, but is down aways (behind support for paragraph attributes and embedding images, for example). Regards, Scott Rick Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: PR for MetaCard
On Thu, 11 May 2000, Craig Spooner wrote: I was disappointed to discover some bad press about MetaCard on the ZDNet site in a review of MetaCard by Esther Schindler: http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,389342,00.html Hmm. I hadn't seen that one. We don't have any record of sending her a review copy or indeed of ever having any contact from anyone at that magazine (which I hadn't even heard of). More of a brief hatchet job than a review, really. I particularly enjoyed the part about being "dumped uncermoniously into the English-like scripting language", as if that weren't the whole point of the product ;-) I sent her a rebuttal, but I don't imagine it will change her mind in any way. MC could sure use some "buzz" in the industry and a few well-deserved glowing reviews. Anyone have any suggestion which publications might be more open to reviewing a product like MC? Is MC's niche -- which is certainly multifaceted -- significant in the industry? We haven't done too badly on reviews overall lately: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchive.pl?/98/37/rmetcrda.dat.htm http://www.elementkjournals.com/sun/9912/sun99c2.htm http://the-internet-eye.com/reviews2000/Jan/MetaCard/default.htm The InfoWorld review is particularly significant since that's the second largest magazine in the IT market (InformationWeek having a bit larger circulation), and they weren't so kind to one of our major competitors (ToolBook): http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ic/xml/00/01/10/000110ictool.xml We haven't had much luck getting Mac magazines to review the product, but given their penchant for picking on the UIs of products, maybe that's a benefit in disguise. Certainly Cross Worlds should have a much better shot at them with their new UI. Regards, Scott PS: My review of the ZD site is not so glowing either: it was very slow loading, I got two timeouts while doing searchs, ran into several broken links and missing images, and found little useful information on any competing products for all my effort... Craig /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Craig Spooner Instructional Multimedia Specialist and WebCT Administrator Office of Instructional Services Colorado State University (970) 491-2516 **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Wed, 10 May 2000, Christoph Wollek wrote: Thanks, Richard and Dave, for answering, but my problem is not, to set via html-shortcut the textstyle of word in a text to bold ot set the textcolot of a word to blue - but to set the backcolor of all words of a text to - say - wheat. something like put the htmlText of fld 1 into tData replace "word" with "Backcolor = "wheat"word/Backcolor" in tData set the htmlText of fld 1 to tData Is there a shortcut in the Metacard html syntax, that I could do that? Yes, and there's an easy way to find out what it is too: set the backcolor of word 1 of field 1 to red put the htmlText of field 1 Regards, Scott Christoph ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Limit Visual Effect?
On Mon, 8 May 2000, Scott Rossi wrote: Is there any way to confine the effect of a visual effect to specified region of a stack when going from card to card? Nope. I know you can use hide and show with visual effects to localize the resulting transition, but how about when navigating between cards? Why would you want this, and what would happen if the areas outside the rectangle you specified changed between cards? Actually I can probably tell you: they'd either suddenly appear at the end of the effect or they'd be ghost objects that would only appear when some user action caused them to redraw. Neither of which would be good. Regards, Scott Thanks Regards, Scott _ Scott Rossi Tactile Media - Multimedia Design Creative Director Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.tactilemedia.com 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. Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Re: Lock Messages Permanently
On Wed, 3 May 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: From: Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Lock Messages "Permanently" On Tue, 2 May 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: There are times when I want "all scripts to shut down" how can you just tell your whole stack i.e. all handlers etc to "shut down. . .don't do anything right now while I work, I'll tell you when we are ready to run the show again." Can you be more specific about which messages are causing the problem? Just choosing the pointer tool should shut down most of them... Regards, Scott Sure, let's say we are in card number one, and the presentation, when opening Card number 2 runs a handler that shows a field and dynamically changes a button icon over time (see below). . .well, during development, everytime we pass thru card 2 we don't want that to run. . .if I choose the pointer tool and use the Navigator dialogue to go to flip through the cards, when passing thru card 2, it still runs even though the pointer tool is selected. If you have similar handlers in 10 cards in a 20 card presentation it really slows your development down if they all have to run every time you make a move. on preopenCard set the icon of button "theimage" to 2018 hide fld "MainText" hide button "theImage" end preopenCard on openCard wait 200 milliseconds showIt end openCard on ShowIt show fld "MainText" with visual effect iris open slowly wait 200 milliseconds show button "theImage" with visual effect dissolve fast wait 1 seconds repeat with x = 1 to 18 wait 20 ticks set the icon of button "theImage" to x+2000 end repeat end showIt Whats neededis a "global static" mode. The solution is much simpler: just lock messages before you go to the card. For example running "lock messages; go next" in the message box will do what you want. Tuv Snyder told me he even put a button in the Navigator palette that allows selecting this behavior, a modification I recommend if you do this kind of thing a lot. Regards, Scott PS: Be sure to edit your subject lines! I'm starting to see "Re: Digest metacard..." as the message subject more and more often. Hinduism Today Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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: Lock Messages Permanently
On Tue, 2 May 2000, Sivakatirswami wrote: There are times when I want "all scripts to shut down" while I do basic construction. But lockMessages set to true only "sticks once" i.e. if you are in the stack components examining various cards and work to create new card in new positions add graphics. . .you can lockmessages in the message box, but then the next time you make a move everything "starts jumping again." how can you just tell your whole stack i.e. all handlers etc to "shut down. . .don't do anything right now while I work, I'll tell you when we are ready to run the show again." Can you be more specific about which messages are causing the problem? Just choosing the pointer tool should shut down most of them... Regards, Scott Sivakatirswami Editor's Assistant/Production Manager www.HinduismToday.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] **** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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 Mon, 1 May 2000, Pierre Sahores wrote: Scott Rossi 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? Thanks for any suggestions. Regards, Scott Far the same question but with Linux : a standard stack is seen as a shell script by the system. How to do to get it lauched by the mc engine when i click on the stack (without to have to build a standalone). Linux is tricky because most versions come with an "mc" that's "Midnight Commander" (hey, we were first, but we asked them to change and they chose to ignore us). So your options are: a) make sure the MetaCard "mc" is on the user's PATH environment variable before /usr/bin/. b) write another shell script that finds the engine and runs it with the stack and have the user run that instead of your stack. c) hack the header of the stack to run "/some/dir/mc" instead of just "mc". This is straightforward to do, but you must not change the file size (i.e., delete some of the nulls in the header to make room for the path). Regards, Scott Thanks too for any suggestions. Regards, Pierre Sahores CRDP de l'academie de Creteil WEB, DB, ASP, VPN, B2B design 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. ******** Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that... 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.
