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From: dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: HyperCard
Message-ID: <98@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 28-Aug-87 19:42:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: f.98
Posted: Fri Aug 28 19:42:40 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 05:30:21 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 25
Keywords: HyperCard has a non-standard user interface

The most striking thing about HyperCard is its non-standard user interface.
By encouraging people to develop applications with HyperCard, which allows
the programmer to paint the screen to look however he likes, Apple is
effectively abandoning the User Interface Guidelines, which, in my
estimation, is one of the major contributors to the success of the Mac.  I
am not too surprised to see this from Atkinson, who also wrote the non-
standard MacPaint.  I guess he just doesn't understand the value of a
standard user interface.

It is very annoying that the print stack command from the File menu doesn't
let one specify the range of cards to be printed.  It is very annoying that
HyperCard does autosaves--another non-standard "feature".  Why aren't there
Save and SaveAs items in the File menu?  I've already destroyed and had to
restore several stacks while demoing HyperCard because of the non-standard
autosave "feature".  It is also annoying that HyperCard doesn't have a way
to easily create new menus--at least there's no hint in the Help stack about
how to do it.

I suspect that the reason people are so awed by HyperCard is that they
simply haven't seen a program like this before--which is not to say that
there haven't been programs like this before.  Once they get over the
initial "surprise" they are going to find out that it really isn't so great.

Duane Williams
dtw@me.ri.cmu.edu