Plus / WinPlus / OracleCard / Oracle Media Objects

[boley]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Media_Objects

This is one that I used professionally for several years. The Oracle name and its ability to run cross platform made it an easier sell to IT types who were still largely in the real men only use the command line camp. It was very polished at the time, probably the cleanest implementation of xtalk type programs I used until LC came along.

[richmond62]

Dig out your old PPC Mac:

https://archive.org/details/Oracle_Medi ... osh_Oracle

[OpenXTalkPaul]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Media_Objects

This is one that I used professionally for several years. The Oracle name and its ability to run cross platform made it an easier sell to IT types who were still largely in the real men only use the command line camp. It was very polished at the time, probably the cleanest implementation of xtalk type programs I used until LC came along.

Thanks, I never used or even heard of it when it was around so I only know what I've read about it in recent research. Of course I've heard of Oracle mostly because of JAVA, but I never knew they had an xTalk implementation until last week! I looked at some online documentation for it and it seems like it must have been quite nice! Maybe I'll see If I can find a copy and give it a spin in an emulator or VM.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Dig out your old PPC Mac:

https://archive.org/details/Oracle_Medi ... osh_Oracle

Oh it's PowerPC?!?!? EXCELLENT!!!
I still have my MDD G4 up and running (along with my trusty ancient Mac512KE) that I keep around for old media stuff!
I'll definitely give that a spin when I get a chance!

[OpenXTalkPaul]

This thread was one of the earliest posts on these forums...

Since I'm currently running some really old xTalk(s) on my iPad via a Basilisk II ( emulating a maxed-out Mac Quadra 900 ) and for the first time ever I'm really giving Oracle Media Objects a thorough spin, I though I should update this thread.

The thread title changed to Plus / WinPlus / OracleCard / Oracle Media Objects, better reflecting its history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlus

Oracle Media Objects 1.0.5 (circa 1996) runs really well under the Moto 68040 emulation.
As far as I can tell there's no 'save as standlone app' option, but you could distributed your applications (stacks) with a 'player' engine, which was available in either Mac or Windows versions. 'Oracle Card", as it was initially called, was the first xTalk to have a cross-platform runtime. It also had its own 'XCMD' (add-on compiled code libraries) format that was also cross-platform. Even its standard UI controls were modular, existing as object files in an object folder which you could add new object types to. Not only is all of that cross-platform (Mac and Win), but It's also a much more advanced xTalk/xCard than HyperCard and others. Its dialect is more comparable to OpenXTalk I think. There's good color support and vector graphics drawing capabilities, animated objects along paths, a 'data grid' spread sheet objects, etc. It's really nice. There's no tools palette or inspector palette, instead there's a combined Toolbar/Property inspector. There's a control browser, which is very much like an early version of 'Application' browser. Obviously other xTalk makers were looking at the competion and 'borrowing' ideas.

Oracle had purchased 'Plus'/WinPlus and its original source code mostly to have it as a marketing tool for their DB business because at the time (late 1980s), Oracle Forms ONLY ran on DOS. Forms didn't support Windows graphical UI at all so this purchase gave them something to show potential. clients as far as GUI editing for this new-fangled OS 'Windows' that was just starting to be really popular then.

By The late 1990s Oracle had their Oracle Forms Editor with Windows support, and Java was quite successful as well (I wish Oracle had built a nice UI editor like that when they made Java), and so Oracle abandoned Oracle Media Objects. Last updated in 1998.

I feel like xTalk's biggest problem of user adoption has always been negatively affected by business decisions (pragmatic, sound business decisions as they may've been), and the more I read about the histories of these companies the more I confirm that idea. OMO is a perfect example. I don't think Oracle ever wanted to get into HyperMedia authoring empowering every-day users to build cool custom software, Oracle bought WinPlus as a marketing tool, tick off a check-box for the latest greatest buzz word thing (Windoze 3.x lol).

[OpenXTalkPaul]

For clarity, the classic macOS (classic) version of OMO is a FAT binary, which back around 1996 meant that it could run natively on either Motorola 680x0 or PowerPC CPUs.

I'll try to update this thread with some screen-shots and more information.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

InfoWorld was a weekly/bi-weekly trade magazine, printed like a mini-newspaper style, if I recall correctly. There was also a MacWEEK magazine around that time ( I still have some of those in my possession ).

Oracle Card article, April 1992:

InfoWorld Apr 27, 1992.png (9.49 MiB) Viewed 2550 times

Oracle continued to use OracleCard->Media Objects as a marketing playing chip, between around 1994-98 the ideas of "Interactive TV" (think Apple+Bandai's Pippin), and then later 'streaming media', became hot techy buzzwords of the day. The idea then was to market to big media broadcasters and news outlets like Washington Post, I guess for building custom content management systems. I don't know that any of Big Media adopted OMO, but apparently the US Postal Service did use it for something.

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 8.27.18 PM.png (1.77 MiB) Viewed 2550 times

I purposely did not crop out the surrounding articles because they provide important context of some happenings in tech at the time. Look at those prices, $1000 for 20 MEGABYTES of flash storage, !

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Some screenshots of Oracle Media Objects in action

48101FF5-F906-4AED-98B5-6D583B9563B4.jpeg (465.74 KiB) Viewed 1895 times

If you’re wondering what a picklist is, it’s like the Answer command but with a Lineed List of items to select from, there were several XCMDs for HyperCard that could present a similar ListSelect dialog box at the time.

OMO had some impressive features for that time, like vector graphics...with curves, and handle-bar style editing of Curve points!

D3DFCD21-BB30-46FC-9F65-A3C249C50DD5.jpeg (2.22 MiB) Viewed 1895 times

[OpenXTalkPaul]

One of OMO 'control'/part types is a Timer object.
These timer controls are visible in edit-mode but invisible when in run mode.
You can set them to send messages, trigger handlers in their object script, etc.

They're much like what I had in mind for a timer/'sequencer' widget, an idea I may have mentioned on here some time ago.

The idea was that it would have a property that could be set to a list of delta-times + statements that would get sent to the script engine to execute when that time arrives, probably mostly posting messages to objects. Then I was thinking it could have a time-line that could optionally be displayed while playing back the events.
Being a widget, means the timer is running in the UI thread rather than the script execution thread, so it's a lot like a 'non-blocking' timer (a bit like 'wait with message').
If nothing else a timer widget like that would be very useful for HTML5 standalone where the engines 'send [message] in [time]', wait with messages, and similar do not work correctly as expected (of course in a browser you could always use JavaScript /HTML5 APIs to do the timer stuff).

Since I dreamed of this I've actually did find a 'Timer' extension that someone else wrote (I think it might have been *Mad Pink'?), but I never got around to spending any time to check that out.