Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Look out Hypercard, its Supercard!
Message-ID: <876@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 7 Dec 88 21:04:32 GMT
References: <16310014@hpsmtc1.HP.COM>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Distribution: na
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 52

In article <16310014@hpsmtc1.HP.COM> dlw@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (David L. Williams) writes:
>Interesting to find this out after Dan Allen's posting about no real new 
>features to Hypercard(God only knows when HC 2.0 will show).  It will be really
>interesting to see if this comes to pass. How long would it take the 4 Apple
>Hypercard programmers to add in support for multiple windows and the like? 
>Perhaps Apple should sub-contract out to Silicon Beach! ;)

Perhaps they should.  Don't get me wrong, I think Hypercard is
terrific.  But does anyone else get the feeling that Hypercard will be
updated and improved on as "timely" a basis as all the other in-house
Apple applications were?

MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw, and MacTerminal were all fantastic when
they were first released, but then were frozen for almost three years,
as third-party applications far exceeded their limitations (although it
took a while to top MacDraw).  Finally, Apple gave MacWrite, MacPaint
and MacDraw to Claris and all three have been updated to one degree or
another; with the exception of MacWrite, all three have had extensive
functionality added.  Note also that the time required to perform this
updating was minimal, especially as compared to the years Apple had.

MacTerminal, on the other hand, which Apple kept in-house and
classified as "system-software", has been given a couple of cursory
updates (to fix bugs and incompatibilities, I believe, not to extend
functionality) and that was it.  It's still not substantially better
than it was four years ago, and there's been not a peep out of Apple
about an imminent new update.

Maybe Hypercard will be different, but aside from supporting a few more
commands and working with locked stacks, Hypercard is no different now
than it was the day it was released.  That's too bad, since it's such a
great program, and it has such potential.

But it's still breathtakingly slow, it still doesn't support true
hypertext in any real sense (i.e., links associated with text, rather
than card position), and of course no color or full-screen cards.  And,
unless you're using something like the third-party Reports!, you can
forget about printing altogether.

Again, I *do* think Hypercard is amazing just the way it is, but for
those of us who saw the pictures in MacWEEK of a prototype screen from
SuperCard, Hypercard's limitations become all too apparent, and we are
once again reminded of just how slowly development is proceeding within
Apple.

Comments anyone?

-- 
   Steve Baumgarten             | "New York... when civilization falls apart,
   Davis Polk & Wardwell        |  remember, we were way ahead of you."
   cmcl2!esquire!sbb            | 
   esquire!sbb@cmcl2.nyu.edu    |                           - David Letterman