WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME!

[richmond62]

After supper, when I sit down in front of a desktop computer as, currently, on our balcony watching the sun go down, drinking gin and tonic, smoking a pipe, reading Oliver Goldsmith, and discussing his assessment of the Russian Zeitgeist with my wife.

[richmond62]

https://www.supercard.us/supercard-in-parallels.html

"SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future."

this, of course, means that in terms of developing programs for current versions of MacOS it is functionally useless.

https://www.supercard.us/faq.html

"Apple has gone back on their promise to deliver 64-bit Carbon frameworks."

Blaming Apple.

Committing Suttee [i.e. committing suicide]:

"SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future." AGAIN

Silly thing: Mac ONLY restricts developers to a very small market sector.

Shortsighted:

"SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future." AGAIN

Lazy:

"SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future." AGAIN

So, SuperCard is no longer simply restricted to MacOS, it is restricted to a shrinking subset of MacOS.

Roll your eyes as much as you like, Richard, but to the average Jo [consider me one of those] reading the SuperCard
website the very strong message seems to be, "Yes, you can buy our product but be aware that is will become increasingly useless."

Why, for the sake of argument, would anyone invest in SuperCard to develop software where they are going to have to tell
clients to downgrade their install of macOS or run an earlier version of macOS in a virtualisation environment to use the thing?

"https://www.supercard.us/supercard-in-parallels.html"

AND, whether the developers of SuperCard are good friends of yours or not, their website sends out distinctly negative signals:
just as I have a friend who is an ESL teacher who gets just about everything so wrong that he has started 3 ESL schools that
have all closed in short order owing to a rapid fall-off of kids: that does not stop my considering the bloke a friend of mine; but
my friendship is not going to make me defend his awful methodology.

[richmond62]

By way of comparison, let's look at Livecode.

0. While I dislike and disagree with their dropping of the Open Source version, I do understand their reasoning for doing so.

1. LiveCode delivers on Macintosh, Windows, and to a reasonable extent (considering the range of operating systems that are
in some way termed 'Linux' it is amazing) Linux.

2. The LiveCode website does not blame Apple, Microsoft, Shuttleworth, or anyone else for difficulties the LiveCode team
may encounter with new recensions of operating systems [and I assume they had a lot of work to cpe with the Apple
change to ARM processors].

[FourthWorld]

Given your long history of dismissive assessments of the technical skills of the LiveCode team, now extended here to the SuperCard team, Occam's Razor suggests your words exemplify the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

But this may be your moment to shine, Richmond, to correct such perceptions once and for all:

How much experience do you have coding GUI development systems in C and C++, and porting them from Carbon to Cocoa?

Decades?
Years?
Months?
Ever run a make file?

Bonus points if you can explain how you came to believe the SuperCard team controls Apple, which would be needed to make SuperCard responsible for Apple's decision to backpedal on the plan for the OS vendor to deliver a 64-bit Carbon framework.

The one thing you described accurately is the SC site being very candid about the product's limitation while they continue to support their legacy customers. I wouldn't fault anyone for honesty, but perhaps that's a matter of taste.

[richmond62]

I wonder what makes you feel so superior that you can perpetually demand justifications from me?

the technical skills of the LiveCode team, now extended here to the SuperCard team

If you took the trouble to read my postings carefully you would see that I have never dismissed anyone's technical skills.

What I have done is pointed out some things to do with presentation of products.

[tperry2x]

"What a Pox:"

https://web.archive.org/web/20110416025 ... signup.php

disnae wark: and there I was (late, very late, to the party, as usual) hoping to play around with the thing.

Try it without the https, http://web.archive.org/web/201104160254 ... signup.php

[OpenXTalkPaul]

New user TAK1974 is NOT a bot!

Welcome aboard!

Newly registered users must now be approved by a forum admin before their account will be activated.
I think the spam posts have been squashed, but this won't stop spam bots from registering new accounts.

[TAK1974]

Hello everyone. I learned Hypercard as a kid, then moved on to SuperCard, and then to LiveCode a few years ago. I've been following the forums for a while and am a huge fan of the work you have all done, and the passion you have to keep xtalk alive. I recognize a few of your names from the SuperCard and LiveCode forums over the years. I look forward to contributing to some of the discussions here.

[richmond62]

Come on in, the water's warm, and the sharks don't bite, merely nuzzle your legs.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I learned Hypercard as a kid

Cool, same!

I was 17yrs old when HC came out, prior to that I only knew a little BASIC (Atari and RadioShack TRS-80 BASIC).
A few years later I was using a lot of AppleScript and working in Print (still do), I would make simple Graphic Interfaces for those scripts with HyperCard. I was also a FutureBASIC user (so I could build XFCNs/XCMDs) and later got into AppleScriptObjC for a bit. I could never get into SuperCard (although I did eventually get a license for SC 4.7.3 as part of 'Humble Bundle'), I just didn't like their IDE. I tried a bunch of other languages along the way (like PASCAL), but none have ever quite fit with my way of thinking as xTalk(s) do.

I don't recall ever hearing about RunRev of LiveCode until about a year after the Crowd Funding campaign to open-source it, but it seemed like a natural, cross-platform evolution of what HyperCard could've been.
The introduction of Extension Builder is really what kept my interest, allowing us to use cool stuff like Apple's CoreMIDI!

[TAK1974]

I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 as well. Hypercard on a Mac Classic. I did make a couple XCMD/XFCN using CompileIt and Hypercard. SuperCard IDE is different from LiveCodes. I did like that SuperCard had a project script layer that acted like the mainstack script LiveCode, but was above the stack script layer. I also liked that SuperCard had hooks into speech recognition on the Mac. I was able to do some voice controlled home automation using SuperCard and some shell scripts. I wrote a home accounting app for myself at one point.

I've looked into Python recently, but xtalk just seem so much easier to understand and more efficient code wise.

[overclockedmind]

For me, it was BASIC first on a borrowed VIC-20, tons of carts (hello, RAM expansion!) as well as a cassette deck storage device, and a LOAD of books, magazines, et cetera from the period. Holy cow, did some of those pieces of code have errors in them; seems like more did than did not. I of course was typing ? instead of print and skipping superfluous spaces, to save RAM. Did I have expansion? Yes. Did I generally elect to use it? No, I wanted anything I coded to be runnable on a "stock" machine.

Oddly, I also learned HyperCard at around 17 (believe it was actually earlier, "ninth grade" on this side of the pond) when my high school instructor decided I needed "to program" (he was trying to break me in easy) and I later had a Mac SE/30, which duh had it on there too, at home. I skipped lunch for the $10 to purchase the SE/30... at an amateur radio "hamfest." It also had the OG SimCity on it, which if I'm being honest? I lugged the thing around from one math/science classroom to another by day and coded, and lugged it around at night if I was going/staying someplace (think Grandparents) to play the ever-loving $DEITY out of SimCity.

Welcome to you!

[tperry2x]

Welcome Tak,
I look back on the days of owning a classic and messing around with Hypercard. Simpler times, but a lot of fun.
Our school had SE macs with the twin floppy drives (no hard drive, so the boot disk was a floppy that we were always nicking to make copies of)

Kids don't realise how lucky they are these days.

[overclockedmind]

Welcome Tak,
I look back on the days of owning a classic and messing around with Hypercard. Simpler times, but a lot of fun.
Our school had SE macs with the twin floppy drives (no hard drive, so the boot disk was a floppy that we were always nicking to make copies of)

Kids don't realise how lucky they are these days.

You know, those 20 meg hard drives were craptastic, if I remember my facts straight... mine worked for the duration of the time I owned the thing, so I can't complain.

I hear the SE to Classic transition is where we really lost the True 80's machine (like an XT, throw it down the stairs, see if it boots, please no monitor) to Early 90's, which didn't hold up at all nearly as well.

I can eat later, but here's to the SE, in any form.

[neville]

Hello all (and World)

My name is Neville, and I am an alcoh.. no, sorry that's LiveCo ... no that's xTalk addict.

Have been since the I joined the standing ovation when Hypercard was first shown at the Apple Developer Conference.

I am so glad to have found OpenXTalk, as it seems my long journey with the "ex-Mothership" may be coming to an end in a few years (don't know why I lost track of this group 3 years ago). And it seems there are lots of familiar faces here in the crowd (wave to Richard, Jacque, Richmond..).

My objective here, as well as writing and maintaining various apps and utilities for my own or perhaps more general non-commercial use, is to maintain/update a large app I wrote over many years which manages tournaments for a national not-for-profit organisation and does all their admin like keeping the membership database, mailing lists and some features of the WordPress website --- Oh, major point, I do hope the server version of 9.6.3 is included in OpenXTalk!???

I am looking forward to seeing what additions and bug fixes have been made. Couldn't launch OpenXTalk first.app, but presumably that's going to be fixed [I hope wunderkind "Tom-who-provided-the fix-for-Sonoma" has been persuaded to join in! Patching a binary app that you have never seen before is magic stuff.] So I have a few thousand forum articles to read before I start contributing.

But while I am here, and because I couldn't see a "New thread" button just a "Post reply" button, I do seem to have come across a bug (in LC9.6.12 but I would guess it goes back a long way) or maybe I have an incorrect setting. Perhaps someone here has seen something similar. I have a stack which includes about 200 images on one page. Images can be dragged-and-dropped, so export snapshot is being called multiple times. While testing, the whole set of images are often deleted and re-created from their PNG files. After running this in the IDE for a few days, suddenly the whole stack comes to halt and the screen starts flashing up random pieces of previous screens, presumably old cached or buffered images. The Mac itself has problems swapping to a different app, so maybe it is a macOS problem, though that seems unlikely. Could be a memory leak (certainly drag-and-drop of images used to have a memory leak) though the Mac does not report any memory pressure. Maybe I have come up against an internal cache or screen buffer limit. I have acceleratedRendering off as that seem to have caused other problems. Any ideas?

Neville Smythe
VicePresident, Australian Go Association

[richmond62]

Welcome Neville.

Re your stack going wonky:

1. Have you tried running it in OXT Lite 1.06?

Might not be a bad idea because:

2. OXT's departure point from LiveCode was version 9.6.3 (the last Open Source version), and 9.6.12 is an LC concern only.

I had a spot of difficulty understanding what is going on: I assume (?) that when you talk about drag-and-drop you mean "grab an instack image and drag it offstack onto a computer's desktop".

If it is not a problem can you upload a version with just 3 images in it?

[FourthWorld]

Hold everything! Neville, you play Go?

How did I not know that about you after these years?

[richmond62]

Many long years ago I was graded 5 Kyu: but I think, like my Judo, Karate, and Tae Kwondo, it went badly off the boil many years ago.

[neville]

Hi Richard
Yes Go has been my other addiction for 50 years. I have been a Director of the International Go Federation for a number of years, although I am about to retire from that position.

Richmond: I am pretty sure the trouble comes from a very large number of images being created, and LC's internal buffering of the screen eventually breaks down. A small demo stack is unlikely to encounter the problem. By drag-and-drop I am dragging one image onto another within the same card (it's a game, in a pretty big project which may attract new users to LC/OxT because users can modify how the game works using plain language scripts - more details to be revealed some time down the track)

I will indeed be trying it out in OxT (Why Lite?) if nothing else to see the two platforms have diverged, though I would be surprised if stuff at that depth in the engine has been modified yet

Neville

[richmond62]

'Lite' because 'Heavy' has sat at a release candidate for over a year.