Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: How 'Bout HyperCard!
Message-ID: <5765@cup.portal.com>
Date: 22 May 88 18:29:49 GMT
References: <8465@aspvax.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 39
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.4407

Rob Ginn writes:
>It seems to me (after playing with it for a while) that HyperCard (tm)
>is nothing more than a WorkBench.  Each icon is basically a directory [...]
>you could get something that operated pretty much the same by taking
>WorkBench and adding the capability to change the background picture for each

I wish. Your observations are accurate in a very, very abstract kind of
way. Both Workbench and Hypercard allow you perform potentially arbitrarily
complex and powerful actions by clicking on icons with a mouse.

There the similarity ends.

The set of modifications/enhancements to Workbench/Hackbench that you
suggest amount to writing Hypercard from scratch. The only thing you
gain from starting from the Work/Hack-bench environment is the ability
to specify actions by clicking on icons, which is (A) a trivial subset
of the entire functionality required, and (B) is relatively easy to
implement outside of the environment of Workbench anyway.

Now that I've stressed that you're underestimating the scope of what
you suggest, I must admit that you *would* be able to create some kind
of simple hypercard stack-like thingie based on Workbench icons more easily
than you could if starting from scratch. So it's not necessarily a bad
idea. However, for it to save you work, you must a priori accept that
you'll be pounding a square peg into a round hole, and you won't be able
to get it to do a lot of kinds of things that Hypercard allows (without
a ton of work that negates the supposed advantage).

If what you wanted was the full functionality of Hypercard, then this
really isn't the easy way to go. If you want something less, well, it
depends on exactly what you want.

It's easy to underestimate what's required for a project if you don't look
into the implementation details. *Everything* is *conceptually* simple.
	Doug
--
      Doug Merritt        ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
                      or  ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
                      or  ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug