Toolbook? Richmond? Anybody?

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I think Toolbook was a Windows only xTalk implementation and so I would NEVER have bothered with it even if I had know about it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolBook

[richmond62]

Toolbook? Richmond? Anybody?

If that is meant to be a joke . . . Ho, Hum . . .

For my sins I slaved with Toolbook 5 when I worked at the UAE University in Al Ain in 1998
because, on coming in one day to check on my HyperCard standalones running on about 100 machines running MacOS 8.5
I discovered they were not there because the Sheikh (i.e. man with no education, 4 wives, the mind of a desert rat and
oil pumping out of the ground in his backgarden) had, over-night decreed that all the Macs should be chucked out and replaced with
machines running Windows NT, so they were, literally overnight . . .

Had to recreate all my HyperCard things in Toolbook; a bit like what my father said was his favourite leisure activity:

banging his head on the wall

why?

because it feels great when it stops.

ToolBook 5 was certainly NOT "colourised HyperCard for Windows", it was an uphill struggle, most unintuitive, and I would not
have touched it with a 10 foot pole if it had not been part of my job description.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Ah sorry to hear that... I would've gone dumpster diving for those macs
I've threaten to quit when IT types have suggested to do prepress graphics work on Windows 9.x back then.

[richmond62]

SShot 2021-09-18 at 12.08.59.png (104.44 KiB) Viewed 7843 times

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https://www.sumtotalsystems.com/toolbook

[richmond62]

When I worked with ToolBook 5 in 1998-9 it was similar to HyperCard insofar
as it could be coded with its embedded OpenScript language with about 1,000 commands.

It seems that later in ToolBook moved further away from that paradigm towards
a drag-n-drop sort of thing, so should not have been considered as a RAD IDE with embedded
language, but more of a "Powerpoint on steroids" sort of thing.

This is probably why the thing is being dropped as there are almost as many
"Powerpoint-on-steroids" things out 'there' as there are pebbles on the beach.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

This is probably why the thing is being dropped as there are almost as many
"Powerpoint-on-steroids" things out 'there' as there are pebbles on the beach.

Yeah I think that's been a problem, some people have always seen Hyper xTalk things as nothing more than a slide-show multi-media tool for people who can't handle "real" (unnecessarily difficult and ugly) programing languages.

[FourthWorld]

Toolbook was awesome when I was hired to build simulations and training systems back in v6.

It had web put way back then, and foreign function interface was built right into the core language by just using optional type declarations.

[richmond62]

I worked with Toolbook v5 and that was just before people realised that web-delivered things
were a good thing, and while v6, from what Richard says, was obviously a jump up, something
subsequently went wrong as it ended up as a non-code, drop-yer-pictures arrangement.