Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!indri!paz.geology.wisc.edu!lll-winken!arisia!sgi!shinobu!odin!odin.corp.sgi.com!portuesi From: portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: UltraCard explanation Message-ID: Date: 28 Aug 89 09:11:08 GMT References: <727@dsacg2.UUCP> Sender: news@odin.SGI.COM Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mtn. View, CA Lines: 76 In-reply-to: nor1675@dsacg2.UUCP's message of 25 Aug 89 22:02:01 GMT In article <727@dsacg2.UUCP> nor1675@dsacg2.UUCP (Michael Figg) writes: The reviews of UltraCard sound real good but I'm still alittle fuzzy about what it can do. Is it mainly a means of handling iff pics and sounds or is it t more of an AREXX type overall handler but from an Intuition perspective? At times it even sounds like mostly a menuing system to possibly replace the Workbench. Am I close? Well, it's all of those things. The easiest way to describe UltraCard would be to see it for yourself, or find the nearest Macintosh and play with HyperCard for a few minutes. I'll try to give some sort of an explanation of what it is about here: Ultra/HyperCard is sort of a free-form database, that manipulates electronic "stacks", or notebooks if you prefer, that have links to the outside world. A stack is kind of like an electronic magazine. It consists of a bunch of "cards", which are like pages in a magazine. That is where the metaphor with printed material ends. You can paint on a card, attach scrollable fields so that the user may enter/edit text, and attach buttons to places or things on the card. Each card has an "script" associated with it, which is a small program in a language called Ultra/Hypertalk. The script can decide what to do when a user interacts with a card by clicking its buttons or doing other things. The cards may be linked together, so that clicking on a button on one card may take you to another place in the stack. The Ultra/Hypercard environment gives you tools to navigate your way around the stack, including a "find" capability that locates cards containing text you specify, commands to return to the last card you saw, and a "history" feature that shows you the last 40 or so cards you visited and allows you to immediately jump to any one of them. Both environments feature a central location where you can see all the stacks available in the environment and call up new ones from disk. In HyperCard, this is called the Home Card. In UltraCard, this is the Control Room. The scripts associated with cards can do things besides interact with the user and other UltraCard objects. They may also interface with the outside world. In HyperCard, this takes the form of calling custom drivers to interface with external devices and programs. In UltraCard, this takes the form of an ARexx interface. So, you may use UltraCard to handle IFF pics and sound if you like. You may also use it as a "visual interface" to ARexx, and indeed build an UltraCard stack to do lots of common system tasks at the push of a button. You can also use it to build visual interfaces to databases, or prototypes of applications software (both have been very popular uses for HyperCard). HyperCard has also served as the basis for Apple's much-touted "multimedia" push. They have put together interactive educational adventures that combine HyperCard with a videodisc to create a movie that people can interact with. HyperCard is also planned as a storage/retrieval mechanism for data on CD-ROM discs. Am I correct that there is a PD demo available called Browser, and if so how do you tell it from the old browser (without looking at it)? There is a PD Browser demo available -- the latest version is 1.11, though it doesn't seem to me to be any more reliable than its predecessors. I do not know if there is a way to tell the version number without looking at it. --M -- __ \/ Michael Portuesi Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc. portuesi@SGI.COM "$16,000! And all he wanted to do was dip us in plaster!"