Author: A.P.P.L.E.

by Dan Shafer Browse. The lowest level of access to HyperCard. All you can do if you’ve been relegated to the ranks of the “browsers,” is go from one card to another. Open a new stack. Go Home. Not much else. So, you’d think the go command would be the simplest, most straightforward word in the HyperTalk vocabulary. You’d be wrong.  In recent weeks, my CompuServe friends and I have been talking about two interesting aspects of this often-used but…

Elon GasparPresident of Bright Star Technologies, and developer of HyperAnimator Joseph MatthewsHyperAnimator Programmer The future evolution of the Macintosh interface may well include something Apple calls an “anthropomorphic agent” — a software-based lifeform that would reside in your computer, talking and listening to you, acting for you at your behest. Such an agent would be a kind of artificially intelligent alter ego, a software version of yourself that would know something about your style, your passions, your work habits, that…

How and Why to Use External Commands and Functions By Christopher Watson It is now evident that a new trend in programming has attracted a significant part of the Macintosh community. In growing numbers, novice programmers use HyperCard and its built-in language, HyperTalk, as a springboard toward involvement in higher levels of development. This makes good sense for several reasons. To begin with, HyperTalk is well suited as a beginner’s language, and learning it provides a quick and easy method…

by Raines Cohen Last January’s MacWorld Expo in San Francisco featured a number of announcements exciting to HyperCard developers. Some were notable in and of themselves, while some represent milestones in discussions that began long ago and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The most talked about software of the show was, of course, SuperCard from Silicon Beach Software. SuperCard is a HyperCard-like package that is highly compatible with the Apple product yet goes beyond what HyperCard can now…

By Dennis Austin It takes a lot of planning to put together a memory policy, and you never get it right the first time. No matter how much time you spend, it always seems you could be using memory more efficiently. The memory manager offers a wealth of tools for its control. The grow zone function is probably the most powerful, but it is only a tool, not a solution. This article explains ways you can use the grow zone…

Programming in C By Allen Holub Most Mac compilers claim to support the ANSI C Standard, in fact they support a subset of ANSI. Among the features most often omitted from that subset are the new preprocessor directives. The program described in this article corrects this problem to some extent. It is a C preprocessor that augments the standard preprocessor used by your compiler, expanding macros itself in order to support token pasting and the five predefined macros specified in…

“Copyright law does not provide a publisher with any protection against possible law suits brought by users who are unhappy with the performance of the software or who have somehow been damaged by a serious problem with the software.“ by Paul GoodmanMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 84 It’s finally finished. For the last two years your company has been working on its newest software product. Countless days, evenings and weekends went into design, programming, testing and debugging. All of the…

by Raines CohenMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 127 Last January’s MacWorld Expo in San Francisco featured a number of announcements exciting to HyperCard developers. Some were notable in and of themselves, while some represent milestones in discussions that began long ago and are likely to continue for the forseeable future.  The most talked about software of the show was, of course, SuperCard from Silicon Beach Software. SuperCard is a HyperCard-like package that is highly compatible with the Apple product yet…

Michael C. Storrie-Lombardi, M.D.MacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 90 Smalltalk, the original object oriented programming (OOP) environment, has finally arrived as a full-blown Macintosh implementation thanks to Digitalk, Inc., at the extraordinarily reasonable price of $199. Early signs point toward Smalltalk/V Mac introducing OOP and Macintosh personal programming to a large group of people currently unable to find a programming environment that combines power with a minimal learning curve. Getting Excited About Smalltalk/V While most of the personal computer world…

By A.P.P.L.E. StaffMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 — Page 95 Most of the personal computer community recognizes Smalltalk as the brainchild of the enormously creative Learning Research Group led by Alan Kay at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Computer science historians will recognize Smalltalk characteristics with roots in Simula, LISP, and SketchPad. Smalltalk has followed the powerful LISP strategy of treating different types of data (text, graphics, symbols, and numbers) in a uniform manner. It bundles the behavior of each data type…

by Anna O’Connell and Doug HousemanMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 105 “The rollout is the product’s transition from vapor to reality.” “One program shipped recently was written on Mac II’s and tested only on Pluses. The result was the makers didn’t know that the program didn’t run on the SE.” “The size of your market and the status of your competition will determine sales for your product. If the competition is well established and has a full-featured product, you may…

# 3COM 604th Dimension 36 A A/UX 18, 36, 67, 112 A0, 76A5, 19, 76, 79-81, 102Abaq, 107Ada, 42, 44, 45ADD BAR, 102ADD MENU, 102Adobe Systems, 38AI, 10, 11, 110-112,114-116Aldus, 60Amatek, 107Amiga 33 analog-to-digital, 35Ann Arbor Softworks, 156APDA 31Apollo, 112app4Evt, 70-73, 116, 117Apple, 11, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 33, 34-36, 38, 39, 58, 64-69, 73, 75, 76, 79-81, 98, 110, 112, 115-117, 156Apple III, 156Apple menu, 19, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76, 80, 115, 117Apple Pascal 64AppleCD, 36AppleLink, 31,…

by Mick O’NeilMac Tech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 50 As the Macintosh penetration of the corporate and small business market has accelerated, compatibility and connectivity with resident MS DOS software and systems has becomes increasingly important. Thus, multi-system software developers like Microsoft, Aldus, and Word Perfect Corporation have insured that their latest spreadsheets, desktop publishing software, and word processors include the ability to recognize, open, and format data files created under both MS DOS and the Macintosh operating environment. Compatibility between…

Essays on the near future by software wizards Dan Allen, Frank Alviani, Elon Gasper, Ted Johnson, Scott Knaster and Leonard Rosenthal. The Macintosh is now a mature product. As of January 1989 Macintosh is five years old. It has come a long way: from 128 KB of RAM to 8 MB, from 400 KB floppies to 1.2 MB, from no hard disk to gigabytes if needed, and from two applications (good old MacWrite and MacPaint) to thousands. The average Macintosh…

by Jim Salmons and Timlynn BabitskyJFS ConsultingMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 52 The Gunakara Sun Systems Limited of Halifax, Nova Scotia, has released a new programming language and development environment that brings together three distinctly different and powerful computer science methodologies — object-oriented, dataflow and visual programming. No one of these is overwhelming by itself, but by combining them Prograph provides a programming environment and a new language that will change the way you think about and write programs. We…

By Howard KatzMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 28 During my last year of high school, I was initiated into the mysteries of male bonding and five-card stud by a older bachelor who resided on the second floor of the apartment building where I lived. I was seventeen, and for the most part, yes, it was a very good year. The fellow was a cab driver, and way back then the word “hack” had only one meaning. I still think fondly…

By Rick ThomasMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 18 A key word in Apple’s vision for software development is “multi-tasking”. In the future, applications simply will not work with new versions of the Mac OS unless they are designed from the beginning to work cooperatively in a multi-application environment. Rumor has it that beginning with System 8.0 (due to arrive sometime in 1990), the Mac will no longer support DA’s. It’ll be “MultiFinder or Bust!” for Macintosh developers. In this article,…

By Charles T. LukaszewskiSun Remarketing, Inc.MacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 — Page 54 Apple’s Lisa computer never had a chance. Its windows and mice were ahead of their time. A nice sports car cost less than a minimally-configured Lisa system. And the most significant obstacle, which shaped Lisa’s decline and recent return, was that Steve Jobs didn’t want it, and for a very good reason. Jobs’ pet project, code-named Macintosh, was introduced one year after the Lisa at one-third the price. But…

By Randy LeonardMac Tech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 22 Object-oriented programming languages date back to the late 1960’s with the development of the language Simula-67 by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl of the Norwegian Computing Center. More recent object-oriented languages include SmallTalk-80, C++ and Object Pascal. However, until only recently these languages have received little or no consideration as suitable languages for application development on widely used and popular computers. This trend, however, is quickly changing. Recently, NeXT, Inc. announced…

By Dan ShaferMacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 — Page 50 In the past several weeks, I have become aware of several meta-language extensions to HyperTalk that seem to suggest some interesting ways in which Our Favorite Language might be used in the future. I developed one of them for use in a specific project, another came to my attention on CompuServe and a third was sent to me by a reader of my book HyperTalk Programming to show me what could be…