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[FourthWorld]

If they could have had that announcement happen like the day after Steve Jobs said he was killing off HC, that could've seriouly 'went viral' (of course that term didn't exist back then).

MC was around, and many came on board at that time.

Many moved to Director.

Many more moved to the web.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

If they could have had that announcement happen like the day after Steve Jobs said he was killing off HC, that could've seriouly 'went viral' (of course that term didn't exist back then).

MC was around, and many came on board at that time.

Many moved to Director.

Many more moved to the web.

Almost all of those other xTalk (if you could even call Director that by then) dev tools were prohibitively expensive for hobbyists / Indy devs.
I think more than anything the web killed “HyperMedia” tools, it certainly hurt HyperCard. Jobs and Scott Raney were smart to get out when they did, from a business perspective (in a sell carbonated sugar water way, not in a”do you want to change the world” way).

I added to my previous comment about history / memory hole. Gain Momentum is perfect xTalk example. Richard you’re like the only person who’s ever known of it, it may as well have never existed once you’ve gone.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

“pascal hard sell” may be true, but xTalks would be lucky to have as large of a user base as Pascal. Commercial PASCAL products are still for sale and also there’s Lazarus/FCP. Free Pascal Compiler can compile for all sorts of crazy platform targets. XTalk would even be lucky to have as large of an active user base as BASIC, certainly Python and Lau have more active users too.
Some of those tools have a better shot at longevity by using compiler preprocessing to translate to C then you can target whatever GCC, CMake, etc. can spit out Bitcode for.

[FourthWorld]

Gain Momentum is perfect xTalk example. Richard you’re like the only person who’s ever known of it, it may as well have never existed once you’ve gone.

Gain's EOL is perhaps the greatest loss to the xTalk world, but few will ever know. It was the most powerful xTalk I've used.

[richmond62]

https://web.archive.org/web/20180826131 ... bsetup.exe
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Mind you, this will have to wait until I am in front of my MacOS 15 machine as MacOS Monterey and WINE do not seem to play very nicely together.

Oh, well, I'll give things a try:
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Seems a fairly long-winded process:
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And something funny going on here:

"wine@staging is built for Intel macOS and so requires Rosetta 2 to be installed.
You can install Rosetta 2 with:
softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license
Note that it is very difficult to remove Rosetta 2 once it is installed."

As I am installing this on a 2015 iMac: so not an ARM processor in sight.

[richmond62]

Ouch:
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Може би? Чакам.
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Aha: Bloody Silly: one of my anti-virus programs takes umbrage at RadBuilder:
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[richmond62]

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So: let's click on the 'Trial' button . . .

[richmond62]

30 days is a lot better than 10 days and a childish count-down:
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At which point, after a 'quick flash', the thing becomes invisible.

Obviously WINE and whichever windowing system Rad Builder employs do not see eye-to-eye.

WINE crashed completely.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Can you make a 'Trying RadBuilder on macOS with WINE' thread in 'Off-Topic' and move those posts there please?
I have no problem with posts about Longtion RadBuilder (which is still online and for sale, no need for Archive.org)
here: http://www.longtion.com/radbuilder/radbuilder.html)
or Embarcadero's RadStudio here:
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio (Delphi Object Pascal or C++)
...just not in a thread about defunct ancestor of OXT, MetaCard.

[richmond62]

Can you move my posts over to the sort of thread you suggest to get started, please?

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Can you move my posts over to the sort of thread you suggest to get started, please?

Ah, sorry, never-mind...
I just realized from looking at the Gain Momentum thread here that RadBuilder IS in fact a newer name for Gain/Momentum (https://forums.openxtalk.org/viewtopic.php?t=16), which is available for sale (but its current script language looks a lot more like VisualBASIC+JavaScript now than it does an xTalk script). Anyway as far as I'm concerned that puts it on topic for this forum (xTalk implementations).

[FourthWorld]

I just realized from looking at the Gain Momentum thread here that RadBuilder IS in fact a newer name for Gain/Momentum (https://forums.openxtalk.org/viewtopic.php?t=16), which is available for sale (but its current script language looks a lot more like VisualBASIC+JavaScript now than it does an xTalk script).

There's another Richard 'round here who's a Gain fan?

I'm not sure the Longtion product is a newer Gain Momentum.

I was introduced to Gain in '97 while working with a company building training courseware for FedEx. The copies we had were still branded "Sybase Gain Momentum", but Sybase had sold it to Triton Services months earlier. Given the scope of the app we were building, Triton flew out to meet with our team for feedback and support. So while I know Triton had ambitious plans for Gain, and had a Windows port well underway by the time I left the project in '98, I don't know what became of it.

But the scripting language was VERY HyperTalk, an openly embraced heritage. And key features included stack viewers (a control which would let you present a stack in a rectangle on the card of another stack), and its built-in check-in/check-out versioning was awesome.

None of those are evident in the info at Longtion. And it seems unnecessarily expensive to replace the language. I'm thinking the Longtion product has a different origin, and merely shares the same name (and apparently at least some of the same age).

[OpenXTalkPaul]

None of those are evident in the info at Longtion. And it seems unnecessarily expensive to replace the language. I'm thinking the Longtion product has a different origin, and merely shares the same name (and apparently at least some of the same age).

Ah thanks for the better search info! I want to get to the bottom of this and hopefully find the dialect's dictionary.

I'm not sure where I got that from (RadBuilder = Gain ) but it's IDE / editor does look a lot like an xCard to me, and the language looks like it could've been an xTalk at one time and then got influenced by JavaScript (like how Lingo evolved into Action Script).

[richmond62]

Oddly enough, by clicking on the .exe file inside my .wine folder the thing finally started:
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Another single-window IDE.

I have always wondered why 'over there' some people were claiming that a single-window IDE was "modern" (and 'modern' is as about a slippery word as you can find) when Visual Basic V was 'sporting' one in 2003:
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and claiming the common LC/OXT IDE was in some way "old-fashioned".

[richmond62]

Already better that the Xojo I was looking at earlier insofar as one can drag one's "stack" nearer to the Preferences thing:

https://openxtalk.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1283
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Mind you, setting the fontColor of th buttonText wasn't much cop:
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It is very difficultwhere one can add some FREE scripting, rather than use pre-made routines:
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[FourthWorld]

Another single-window IDE.

Technically, that's an MDI (Multi-Document Interface), one of the novel windowing options Windows offered back in the day, in which multiple windows were encapsulated within one parent window. It has since become deprecated in more recent Microsoft design guidelines.

I have always wondered why 'over there' some people were claiming that a single-window IDE was "modern" (and 'modern' is as about a slippery word as you can find) when Visual Basic V was 'sporting' one in 2003

UIs in general have been following a trend toward single windows with multiple panes instead of separate windows for quite some time.

With video editing, for example, nearly every such app throughout the 90s had the same three windows: preview, timeline, and assets. iMovie migrated those to panes within a single window, and we've been seeing more of that across other categories ever since.

This can work well in those IDEs that have layout completely separated from runtime, as most non-xTalks do. In those, you're not so much making a living interface as drawing a picture of an interface. It doesn't become interactive until you leave the drawing environment, compile the app, and then run it in its own runtime environment.

For this reason, single-window UIs are problematic with xTalks, at least when making desktop apps. Mobile apps are contained in a single simulator window in the desktop anyway, so it doesn't matter much for them.

But with desktop apps we have the ongoing design challenge of crafting dev tools in a way that attempts to provide a "normal" interface, but since we're "live-coding" (working on an application while it's running) we also need our app to define the environment.

This leaves is with questions like how to handle the macOS global menu bar: when we're running our app in the IDE, which menus are displayed, the IDE's or our app's?

WindowBoundingRect also comes into play: how do we test our window resizing when maximization is limited to the IDE bounding rect needed to accommodate its toolbar.

And then there are other details that crop up in the day-to-day of working within an xTalk, mostly dealing with window placement but sometimes also including the lifeblood of GUI apps, message inheritance.

For these reasons and more, if an IDE is to embrace the unique advantages of xTalks, they can't constrain themselves to the conventions used in other IDEs where layout doesn't actually make live software but merely draws pictures of software to be run later elsewhere.


SuperCard's Runtime Editor expressed an understanding of the paradox of xTalk IDE GUIs by having three configurations:

1. By default, the RTE took over the menu bar, and presented itself as the dominant app environment you worked inside of.

2. As your app becomes more complete and begins to need the menu bar and other environment-defining elements, you can choose a single-menu option which presents the full set of IDE menus as submenus within one menu at the end of your app's menu row.

3. If you want to keep the IDE out of your menu bar altogether, you could choose to have the RTE present itself as a floating palette which offered those menus, much like NeXT was doing across the board at the time.

We only need a full IDE environment in early stages of layout and structural building.

Eventually we're fine tuning our UI, and spending ever more time in the Script Editor, with less and less time adding objects. It's very beneficial to be able to work inside your app environment while it's running, something most non-xTalks can't dream of doing.


There is no one-size--fits-all in xTalk workflows, so while a single window UI is popular for drawing environments it inhibits the unique value inherent in The xTalk Way.

A configurable IDE, which can define the environment or become a less dominant tool within an environment defined by your app, is arguably an optimal solution to the many, quite different, phases of making apps in an xTalk.

[tperry2x]

Why not just have an extra menu which allows you to toggle between IDE menus, and the menus of the program you are creating?

[OpenXTalkPaul]

"Suspend development tools" should get you into a 'run' mode (like User level 1), which I gather is supposed to make your stack behave like it would running as a standalone. It does that for the most part but doesn't really remove all IDE stuff from memory and does not accurately reflect the speeds your app may achieve running as a standalone (without the IDE firing off all sorts of IDE relate messages all the time), often significantly faster and smother.

I see a lot of influence of mobile devices creep in to all the platforms. Specially single-window App UIs.
Single window / multi-tile can work well for somethings. Media editing sequencers where you want the transport. timeline, other tracks, and track settings to stick together, is a good example (although IMO Apple manage to ruin iMovie's UI at one point it became unusable and unfamiliar to me). Likewise I think tiling-paned style Window managers, like those very common on 1980s-90s Unix boxes - Sun SPARC Stations and the like, and recently making something of a come back with desktop OS integrating screen-edge window-snapping tiling arrangements into the traditional desktop metaphor, can be perfect for certain tasks, like monitoring different bits of server.

Best to set up UI layout to the task at hand, but we do have a somewhat unique problem with xTalks in that we're using an app to make another app.

[richmond62]

I see a lot of influence of mobile devices creep in to all the platforms.

Several times over the past few years 'another compnay' was accused, either directly, or more vaguely, of sacrificing the Desktop "experience" in favour of handheld development.

Now I can see that 'they' obviously feel that it is almost time to "take leave" of the desktop and move towards Cloud/Web-based and handheld apps only.

Personally: seeing the bank, the accountant, the tax office, the hygiene inspectorate, the local tax office, the company registration place (all of which I have visited over the last 3 weeks): shops, restaurants, garages, schools, colleges, universities, and for all I know, brothels, filled with desktop computers I do not know what some people are thinking.
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This looks clever: obviously a laptop and graphic tablet combined:
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