HyperCard Mailing List

Discussion group for HyperCardOnly a little over 2 days left, but they’re also tantalizingly close to the goal:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode
Regards,
Scott

PS: I’m not buying the “I can’t contribute because it’d limit my options” excuse: You don’t even have to look at the code to benefit from the vast increase in market penetration the *language* would get if this open sourcing happens. And unless you can *guarantee* you’ll eventually produce a competitive alternative it seems to me your best bet (not to mention that of all the other humans who might benefit) is to support this one *now*.

PPS: Full disclosure: I’m not involved in this project or the company anymore (in fact, I must confess that I haven’t even used MetaCard or any other programming language for years, since my burnout seems to be relatively complete), but some non-voting stock was part of our deal with them so I do stand to benefit eventually if they pull this off.

PPPS: The thought of exposing all that code I wrote to public examination (and maybe criticism) does put me in a bit of a quandary, but I am at least encouraged that clean up and restructuring is a big part of what the Kickstarter campaign will be funding and is something that will most likely never happen otherwise. Perhaps some of you can even help with that even if you can’t pledge at this time...

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On 2/25/13 4:46 PM, Scott Raney wrote:
> PS: Im not buying the I cant contribute because itd limit my
> options excuse: You dont even have to look at the code to benefit
> from the vast increase in market penetration the *language* would get
> if this open sourcing happens.

You're still here! Hey. :)

That's what I was thinking too. Heaven knows I couldn't even read C++
not to mention write it. The source code won't do me any good at all and
I am not very likely to ever look at it. But the numbers of potential
users is a huge deal for me. It will inspire all the things that
HyperCard did: the creativity, the approachability, the tinkering, the
sense of community, the awe that people feel for the first time when
they can actually do stuff. It will even allow today's 9-year-olds to
make those awful stacks that the AOL forum staff both hated and adored.
I miss that so much. It was what bound this group together to begin with.

I wish I'd saved a copy of "Man gets beheaded by a ceiling fan." If this
goes through, maybe the original author's son will write it again.

> PPPS: The thought of exposing all that code I wrote to public
> examination (and maybe criticism) does put me in a bit of a quandary,
> but I am at least encouraged that clean up and restructuring is a big
> part of what the Kickstarter campaign will be funding and is
> something that will most likely never happen otherwise. Perhaps some
> of you can even help with that even if you cant pledge at this
> time...

I think after all the changes that have gone on over the last ten years,
most of what used to be in there has been altered enough that even you
wouldn't recognize it. So don't worry. You can always just say it isn't
your code. :)


--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

My daughters favorite at 9 was a button I helped her make that spoke the message box. Her stack was called "How not to pronounce words in Spanish" and she would type her homework in, then crack up.

On Feb 25, 2013, at 6:26 PM, "J. Landman Gay" <jacque@[redacted].com wrote:

> It will even allow today's 9-year-olds to
> make those awful stacks that the AOL forum staff both hated and adored.
> I miss that so much. It was what bound this group together to begin with.

I made an abacus stack for her around that time, didn't I?

On Feb 25, 2013, at 6:36 PM, Catherine Kunicki <marsvi0let@[redacted].com wrote:

> My daughters favorite at 9 was a button I helped her make that spoke the message box. Her stack was called "How not to pronounce words in Spanish" and she would type her homework in, then crack up.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

She was a little older then. She started it and you fixed it ; )

On Feb 25, 2013, at 6:42 PM, Colin Holgate <coiin@[redacted].net wrote:

> I made an abacus stack for her around that time, didn't I?
>
> On Feb 25, 2013, at 6:36 PM, Catherine Kunicki <marsvi0let@[redacted].com wrote:
>
>> My daughters favorite at 9 was a button I helped her make that spoke the message box. Her stack was called "How not to pronounce words in Spanish" and she would type her homework in, then crack up.
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>

For anyone not following closely, the LiveCode Kickstarter project has gone past 100%, still with 35 hours to go.

On 2/26/13 3:45 PM, Uli Kusterer wrote:
> For the record: I am kickstarting this.

They just went over the goal. :) They are now into stretch goals, which
I want very much. The first stretch goal is resolution independence,
which means stacks will automatically resize their content to accomodate
any mobile device screen/resolution without any coding.

Many thanks to everyone here who helped. This really is big. If you
didn't pledge before but you'd like to see the stretch goals met,
there's still time.

XTalk lives on, and it will be free.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

Hi y'all,

Great news! HyperTalk's legacy lives-on! :-)

I am wondering, though, WHAT will be programmable in LiveCode ? .. other than Revolution stacks, of-course.
Will we be able to set the scriptingLanguage of a HTML page to "LiveCode" instead of "Javascript" ?
Much in LiveCode has to do with Rev/MC/HC objects and properties ; how does this mesh with web-centric DOM objects ?

At the very least, this will have kickstarted (rekindled) my hope,  ;-)
Alain F.



________________________________
From: J. Landman Gay <jacque@[redacted].com
To: HyperCard-Mailing-List
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:11:29 PM
Subject: Re: [HC] LiveCode Kickstarter goal


 
On 2/26/13 3:45 PM, Uli Kusterer wrote:
> For the record: I am kickstarting this.

They just went over the goal. :) They are now into stretch goals, which
I want very much. The first stretch goal is resolution independence,
which means stacks will automatically resize their content to accomodate
any mobile device screen/resolution without any coding.

Many thanks to everyone here who helped. This really is big. If you
didn't pledge before but you'd like to see the stretch goals met,
there's still time.

XTalk lives on, and it will be free.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Resolution independence is in! Next is pluggable themes, and at £405'000 we'll get a Cocoa port.

And Daring Fireball (John Gruber) just posted about the Kickstarter. I hope that helps with achieving that goal.

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.lookandfeelcast.com



On 27.02.2013, at 00:11, J. Landman Gay <jacque@[redacted].com wrote:
> They just went over the goal. :) They are now into stretch goals, which I want very much. The first stretch goal is resolution independence, which means stacks will automatically resize their content to accomodate any mobile device screen/resolution without any coding.

LiveCode has a CGI mode (event MetaCard had that, IIRC). What it effectively does is give you a GUI-less xTalk, I think. So you can't use it in an HTML page (that would require browsers to support it), but you can use it like VBScript or PHP or Ruby to write your web sites.

You'd still have to use JavaScript for client-side stuff like dynamically reloading subsections, but I guess someone could write a library for the most common cases so the typical scripter doesn't have to know.

I.e. reload a subsection (a div or span) and replacing it with a newly-downloaded page (which can again use xTalk on the server).

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de


On 27.02.2013, at 06:07, Alain Farmer <alain_farmer@[redacted].com wrote:
> Will we be able to set the scriptingLanguage of a HTML page to "LiveCode" instead of "Javascript" ?
> Much in LiveCode has to do with Rev/MC/HC objects and properties ; how does this mesh with web-centric DOM objects ?

On 2/26/13 11:16 PM, Uli Kusterer wrote:
> LiveCode has a CGI mode (event MetaCard had that, IIRC). What it
> effectively does is give you a GUI-less xTalk, I think. So you can't
> use it in an HTML page (that would require browsers to support it),
> but you can use it like VBScript or PHP or Ruby to write your web
> sites.
>
> You'd still have to use JavaScript for client-side stuff like
> dynamically reloading subsections, but I guess someone could write a
> library for the most common cases so the typical scripter doesn't
> have to know.
>
> I.e. reload a subsection (a div or span) and replacing it with a
> newly-downloaded page (which can again use xTalk on the server).

LiveCode server, which is part of the free opensource package, lets you
write HTML pages in xtalk, much as you'd use PHP:

<?rev
put the date
?>

You can do whole xtalk scripts, sprinkled with HTML. RR will also make
the old CGI engine available again too. They had removed it for a while,
but sometimes it's just what you need. That runs text-based scripts as
you describe.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

On 2/26/13 11:11 PM, Uli Kusterer wrote:
> Resolution independence is in! Next is pluggable themes, and at £405'000 we'll get a Cocoa port.
>
> And Daring Fireball (John Gruber) just posted about the Kickstarter. I hope that helps with achieving that goal.

The Woz pledged too, along with a bunch of other luminaries. Our own
Colin Holgate was particularly helpful in heckling important people. He
knows just about everybody, I'm impressed.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

On 2/26/13 11:07 PM, Alain Farmer wrote:
> Hi y'all,
>
> Great news! HyperTalk's legacy lives-on! :-)

You should see the celebrating over on the LiveCode list. :)

>
> I am wondering, though, WHAT will be programmable in LiveCode ?

OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, CGI, server. All in xtalk.

> Will we be able to set the scriptingLanguage of a HTML page to
> "LiveCode" instead of "Javascript" ?

That's sort of what the server product does. It works like PHP. You can
also "do as Javascript" in stacks and (I think) on servers.


> Much in LiveCode has to do with
> Rev/MC/HC objects and properties ; how does this mesh with
> web-centric DOM objects ?

The server product allows you to use xtalk along with the HTML
framework. It's like PHP or Javascript; it adds to the structure but
doesn't replace it.

I have a private web site that is written in xtalk, except for the
static html elements. It serves dynamic images, quotes of the day,
calculates serial keys on the fly, stuff like that, all written in
LiveCode and running on the server.

Another thing that might get resurrected is the abandoned web plugin. It
needs some work but there are community members who want it. It allows
you to run stacks inside a browser.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

On 2/27/13 12:02 AM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> I have a private web site that is written in xtalk, except for the
> static html elements. It serves dynamic images, quotes of the day,
> calculates serial keys on the fly, stuff like that, all written in
> LiveCode and running on the server.

I forgot to mention, after some sweat and blood, I also managed to hook
a LiveCode CGI into Paypal so it can send out customer serial keys when
Paypal gets a payment from my commercial site. AirLaunch and Zygodact
both use it.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay | jacque@[redacted].comHyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com

John Gruber was one of mine too, though that took some amount of publicly embarrassing him to get him to write something!


On Feb 27, 2013, at 12:56 AM, "J. Landman Gay" <jacque@[redacted].com wrote:

> > And Daring Fireball (John Gruber) just posted about the Kickstarter. I hope that helps with achieving that goal.
>
> The Woz pledged too, along with a bunch of other luminaries. Our own
> Colin Holgate was particularly helpful in heckling important people. He
> knows just about everybody, I'm impressed.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In HyperCard-Mailing-List, "Scott Raney" <scott@...> wrote:
> PPPS: The thought of exposing all that code I wrote to public
> examination (and maybe criticism) does put me in a bit of a
> quandary, but I am at least encouraged that clean up and
> restructuring is a big part of what the Kickstarter campaign will
> be funding and is something that will most likely never happen
> otherwise.

Well Scott, it looks like your Kernighan-and-Ritchie-style variable names will soon become famous. ;)

Many thanks to all who contributed, but mostly to you, Scott, for having first built MetaCard in 1992 and stewarding it through the Linux, Win, and Mac ports.

The toolkit that changed my and my clients' companies is about to provide the same revolutionary benefits to the entire world.

<script type="text/livecode">


--- On Thu, 2/28/13, richard g <Ambassador@[redacted].com wrote:

From: richard g <Ambassador@[redacted].com
Subject: [HC] Re: LiveCode Kickstarter goal
To: HyperCard-Mailing-List
Date: Thursday, February 28, 2013, 9:23 AM

--- In HyperCard-Mailing-List, Eric Engle <eric.engle@...> wrote:
>
>
> <script type="text/livecode">
>
>

You forgot to close that tag! Great, now everything from here on down is going to be script too.

> --- On Thu, 2/28/13, richard g <Ambassador@...> wrote:
>
> From: richard g <Ambassador@...>
> Subject: [HC] Re: LiveCode Kickstarter goal
> To: HyperCard-Mailing-List
> Date: Thursday, February 28, 2013, 9:23 AM
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In HyperCard-Mailing-List, "Scott Raney" wrote:
>
> > PPPS: The thought of exposing all that code I wrote to public
>
> > examination (and maybe criticism) does put me in a bit of a
>
> > quandary, but I am at least encouraged that clean up and
>
> > restructuring is a big part of what the Kickstarter campaign will
>
> > be funding and is something that will most likely never happen
>
> > otherwise.
>
>
>
> Well Scott, it looks like your Kernighan-and-Ritchie-style variable names will soon become famous. ;)
>
>
>
> Many thanks to all who contributed, but mostly to you, Scott, for having first built MetaCard in 1992 and stewarding it through the Linux, Win, and Mac ports.
>
>
>
> The toolkit that changed my and my clients' companies is about to provide the same revolutionary benefits to the entire world.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>

On 01.03.2013, at 00:27, D <dannygelder@[redacted].com wrote:
> --- In HyperCard-Mailing-List, Eric Engle <eric.engle@...> wrote:
>>
>>
>> <script type="text/livecode">
>>
>>
>
> You forgot to close that tag! Great, now everything from here on down is going to be script too.

Luckily HyperTalk ignores everything outside a handler that it can't make sense of :-)

Cheers,
-- Uli Kusterer
http://stacksmith.org