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From: leeke@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (Steven D. Leeke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: How do I write a Guided Tour
Message-ID: <17128@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Sat, 11-Jul-87 10:43:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: glacier.17128
Posted: Sat Jul 11 10:43:41 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 16:08:34 EDT
References: <3091@pucc.Princeton.EDU> <2512@husc6.UUCP>
Reply-To: leeke@glacier.UUCP (Steven D. Leeke)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 58

In article <2512@husc6.UUCP> fry@huma1.UUCP (David Fry) writes:
>...
>The April Apple Programmer's and Developer's Association
>calalogue lists product #KMSJGT, "Journalling and Guided
>Tour," for $15.00.  It claims to allow a non-programmer to
>make the tours you want.  NOTE: It says it requires MacDraw,
>but I have no idea why.  It can optionally use Macintalk for
>speech synthesis, not included (but easily, legally,
>obtained).
>...

I got a copy of the Guided Tour Tools from APDA recently and set out to do
a guided tour for a beta release to our sponsors.  So maybe some of the
following will be useful to people.

1) The guided tour stuff from APDA is NOT the same (as far as I can tell) as
what Apple used for the Mac II guided tour (the one I have) and I'll bet for
the SE as well.  The Apple one is far more advanced it seems - which
seems logical.

2) MacDraw is needed because you draw your main screen with buttons in
Draw and fill in a table on the same document telling the GT what to do
when a button is hit.  Save it in PICT format and the GT reads it in when
it starts.

3) The GT tools seemed to work as advertised - but I could never get speech
to work.  I did not have Speech Tutor (I think that's the name), but the
other tools I had could not save the phoneme speech as a resource correctly.
I hacked a short program to save it, but I still couldn't get it to work.
Anyway, since you have to rerecord a session when you add speech it can
be very time consuming - PLANNING AHEAD IS A MUST IN GT DEVELOPMENT!!

4) You can also add dialogs to your GT, but after trying speech I realized
that doing a good GT is a major piece of work - especially since you are
trying to reach people who won't read between the lines (most likely) if
you leave something out.  I think if I were going to do a commercial one I
would dream of doing anything other than what Apple did for the 512k/E/Plus -
use a synch'd tape.  The GT tools are setup to work well with tape and that's
a lot easier than trying to stuff everything into the GT.  In our case we
would have run out of disk space even with a 800k disk since the GT can't
deal with multiple disks or hard disks - so sys/finder/appl/gt all have to
go on one disk.

5) MacinTalk v1.3 (in the APDA catalog but not in existence) is the one
that is supposedly going to work on the SE/II, but since Apple doesn't
sanction it officially I wouldn't use it for anything you don't want to
have to redo substantially, if not completely, for a new machine.

Hope this helps,

Steve Leeke


-- 
Steven D. Leeke, Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University
    {ucbvax,decvax}!decwrl!glacier!leeke, leeke@glacier.stanford.edu

"I suppose they don't use money in the 23rd century?"