Hypercard in Squeak?

Hannes Hirzel Hannes_Hirzel at compuserve.com
Sat May 27 12:05:18 UTC 2000


Question:

>Has anyone looked into creating a simplified Hypercard clone in Squeak? I
was
>wondering if bookMorphs could be used to create "stacks" and button and
text
>field Morphs could be placed on the pages of a stack. I am new to squeak
and was
>wondering if this is possible. It would be nice to have a Hypercard clone
>running on Linux, windoze, and other platforms with inter platform
>compatibility.



Answer:

a)
Alan Kay wrote on 23 Aug 99 to this list
>"A bookmorph all by itself is a database (like a hypercard stack of old).
All text in a
>bookmorph is gathered together for efficient searches, etc...."


b)
Fri,  14:12:35 -0500
From: Mark Guzdial sent on 3 Dec 1999 a changeset to the list:

"[Enh] PluggableTextMorphWithModel for HyperCard-like BookMorphs"

>The attached code creates a very tiny subclass off PluggableTextMorph 
>that is its own model.  The advantage of this is that these can be 
>dropped into BookMorphs and used for notes areas, like in HyperCard 
>notebook stacks.

c)
Jay Carlson wrote 2/28/00, :
>I don't need to convince Squeak people that some aspects of a HyperCard-y
>model are the right thing.   From what I can tell, Squeak *is* moving in
>this general direction.  OK, maybe consensus on a requirements set could
>better congeal a roadmap on how to get there (and thus suck in more people
>to work on it, which would make me happier).  But construction is at the
>core of the dynabook...

d)
Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com
did an example of a Squeak "stack" (i.e. bookmorph) which serves
as a overview of the interesting aspects of Squeak

http://software.freepage.de/cronos/squeak/SqOverview.zip


e)
doing a "search all" on the keyword "HyperCard"
http://macos.tuwien.ac.at:9009/Server.home
gives quite an interesting overview of the things discussed on this list
recenty





Conclusion

Squeak does not yet allow you to do fully what HyperCard does.
(Though in many aspects  it allows you to do much more: For example
you can define your own objects. In Hypercard you are just limited to the
objects predefined for you)


Some next steps towards such a system  probably are 

- Some more example of BookMorphs
-  Instructions how to create BookMorphs and use the various other morphs
in creating dynamic content ("Dynabook"). These instructions should be
available as BookMorphs.
- a function to choose the authoring level (browsing, constructing, full
access). The morphs menus should then reflect the authoring level.



Hannes Hirzel     





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