I recently returned from RunRevLive.11, the company's annual user conference which was this year held in San Jose, California, last week.
What a treat it was to meet with and socialize with so many other LiveCode users! It was exciting to organize what I think was probably the first education session in conference history and to see the many uses of the product in the educational community.
And, finally, it was an experience beyond definition to sit behind fellow attendee Robert Cailliau, co-inventor of the world wide web; across the aisle from Bill Atkinson, one of the main geniuses behind the development of Hypercard (and not ashamed to say so!); and in the same room as Larry Tesler, a member of the original Xerox PARC team who subsequently moved over to Apple and was influential in the development of the Apple Lisa and the Newton.
Remember that these three very important tech figures all enthusiastically use LiveCode the next time some imbecile tells you it isn't a valid development platform, or isn't a "real" development tool, or that we need to stop talking about Hypercard.
We had not one but two education presentations, the second of which went on for two straight hours! Perhaps the "hit" of the conference was Bill Waldman and his magical cigar box, wired up with various boards and circuits that, via a usb connection, "talked" with a LC program. I am hoping that he will do a LiveCode.tv video presentation on this for everyone to see. He used various common RadioShack components along with a USB board from Phidgets.com. And I hope he won't mind my saying so, but whenever I think about his box I am reminded of the Peter, Paul & Mary song Marvelous Toy.
Scott Morrow, from elementarysoftware.com , showed us a number of his "number sense" math programs aimed at elementary school learners. Scott himself has been an educator for 20 years and is keenly interested in the development of "software solutions with an eye towards elementary school students and faculty."
David Brooks also joined us and showed us programs that he's been working on. David has quite the impressive C.V. and has taught both chemistry and education at the university level.
Björnke von Gierke talked about his various educational initiatives, including chatRev, a chat client which connects to a server he operates which allows other LiveCode users to interact with one another in real-time (or something close to it), as well as livecode.tv, a weekly set of 2 or more video tutorials on various aspects of using LiveCode along with a live chat. He also has made a LiveCode stack BvG Docu, which is a much faster version of LiveCode's built-in language dictionary.
In the second presentation, we additionally had Carly Born, Educational Technologist for Carleton College, demonstrating her language learning revlet integrated into the Moodle course management system. The ability to integrate revlets into course management systems is important for educational users of LiveCode who also use course management systems.
Devin Asay, who teaches an introductory course to programming for humanities students at BYU, showed us his website with many resources as well as discussed his general approach to teaching a terminal programming course to non-computer science majors. Devin is a longstanding member of the LiveCode community who frequently co-teaches the beginner's Day Zero tracks at LC user conferences.
We also learned that doing your math homework needn't be dull or frustrating! Max Schafer's MathGadgets, featuring the awesome graphics work of LC developer Scott Rossi, gently guides students through the process of doing various K-6 math problems and can be purchased on a cool robot-looking USB thumb drive.
We were also treated to a very different, education-oriented product being developed using LiveCode by Larry Tesler. His project aims to facilitate constructivist educators to construct year-long lesson plans in which they are able to meet each of the state's standards for curriculum development.
These are just a few of the many diverse educational solutions being developed or which have been developed using LiveCode. Others include Sassoon Joiner, which teaches children the formation of cursive lettering; Jim Hurley's Turtle Graphics and other games, simulations and tools; TwistAWord, a fun word game which has been previously reviewed on this blog; and my own little Multiplication Bingo which aims to make practicing one's multiplication tables a little more fun.
Many of the attending educators walked away with a renewed commitment to evangelizing LC in the educational community and sharing and developing new learning resources. We have also initiated an education-focused FaceBook community which can be found here and hope to see you there!
Friday, May 13, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Multiplication Bingo Released as Shareware
Unbeknownst to me, the game of "Bingo" has long been used as a means for third and fourth grade students to learn their multiplication tables.
Learning one's multiplication tables is journey of descent into the pit of drill and kill -- endless rote memorization of individual multiplication families, endless repetition of multiplication problems that make students simply hate learning in general and math in particular.
And my kids were looking at those twin evils dead in the eye. They were not happy campers.
Enter my idea to use a Bingo motif to get them to voluntarily practice their multiplication tables.
If you Google "multiplication bingo" you will find a bazillion sites that provide printable multiplication bingo cards. Regrettably, this means that someone, preferably a responsible adult like, oh, say, a parent, supervise the Bingo activity.
I wanted something that the little dears could preferably do endlessly on their own without my intervention.
Enter Multiplication Bingo.
I used Rev (erm, LiveCode it's called now) to create a simple program that provided a Bingo card for each of the 2 through 12 times tables families. Each card has 2 or 3 pre-determined routes to achieving Bingo. Each card presents a randomized series of multiplication problems for each number's family. After the 12 family, one can select one of the three randomized cards containing multiplication problems from among the 12 families. The learner can concentrate on a specific multiplication family or families or choose the randomized Bingo cards. Fun sounds provide the learner with feedback.
Again, it is probably not the best coded project anyone has ever seen. But I was able to complete it in time for my kids to learn their times tables and they played and still play the game enthusiastically. I call that kid-tested and kid-approved. The most difficult thing was that I wanted to fake the menu bar rather than use LC's built-in menu builder to keep everything on the Bingo card, and to get that working in an HIG-satisfactory manner, I had to pay somebody else to code that. But that's cool. I'm fine with that :-)
Many kind thanks to Mark Schonewille of economy-x-talk.com for his encouragement and assistance in making this a reality, as well as for making the bloody fake menus actually work :-)
Learning one's multiplication tables is journey of descent into the pit of drill and kill -- endless rote memorization of individual multiplication families, endless repetition of multiplication problems that make students simply hate learning in general and math in particular.
And my kids were looking at those twin evils dead in the eye. They were not happy campers.
Enter my idea to use a Bingo motif to get them to voluntarily practice their multiplication tables.
If you Google "multiplication bingo" you will find a bazillion sites that provide printable multiplication bingo cards. Regrettably, this means that someone, preferably a responsible adult like, oh, say, a parent, supervise the Bingo activity.
I wanted something that the little dears could preferably do endlessly on their own without my intervention.
Enter Multiplication Bingo.
I used Rev (erm, LiveCode it's called now) to create a simple program that provided a Bingo card for each of the 2 through 12 times tables families. Each card has 2 or 3 pre-determined routes to achieving Bingo. Each card presents a randomized series of multiplication problems for each number's family. After the 12 family, one can select one of the three randomized cards containing multiplication problems from among the 12 families. The learner can concentrate on a specific multiplication family or families or choose the randomized Bingo cards. Fun sounds provide the learner with feedback.
Again, it is probably not the best coded project anyone has ever seen. But I was able to complete it in time for my kids to learn their times tables and they played and still play the game enthusiastically. I call that kid-tested and kid-approved. The most difficult thing was that I wanted to fake the menu bar rather than use LC's built-in menu builder to keep everything on the Bingo card, and to get that working in an HIG-satisfactory manner, I had to pay somebody else to code that. But that's cool. I'm fine with that :-)
Many kind thanks to Mark Schonewille of economy-x-talk.com for his encouragement and assistance in making this a reality, as well as for making the bloody fake menus actually work :-)
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Rev Studio $50 until June 14
Yup. Build neat little Mac standalone applications with the world's easiest to learn programming language, RevTalk!
Kick the tires of its free sibling, RevMedia, but don't spend too long because this offer is set to sail into the sunset in less than two weeks.
We're talking about pizza and beer money here... a serious no brainer. RevStudio normally retails for US$249, hence slashing that first digit makes it a serious price-point contender against its rivals. For more information on how the various Rev products differ in terms of features, see here.
Basically, if you don't need seriously geeky things like externals or Oracle database connectivity (and if the mention of these things makes your eyes glaze over, you probably don't need them) and would prefer to be able to deliver a standalone executable application which does not need a player object, RevStudio may be for you. If you don't know what an SSL is, don't spend the extra $$$ on the Enterprise version. Other funky new things I still haven't wrapped my feeble brain around -- datagrid, I'm looking at you! -- you may also not need.
One limitation which must be pointed out is that you can only deliver a standalone application on the same platform that you write it on (but I don't think that precludes delivering for the other platforms using the company's free stack player). In normal human English, this means that if you have a Mac at home, you'd better be making standalones for a classroom of Macs and similarly for the other supported platforms.
Still -- have any oldies but goodies Hypercard stacks you've been trying to bring into the 21st century? Get this product. Fast. Because you can convert them into native Rev stack files (especially plain-vanilla Hypercard stacks without those pesky XCMDs & XCFNs).
Basically, as the company itself so aptly notes, You don't need a computer science degree to get things done with Revolution. So, what are you waiting for?
Kick the tires of its free sibling, RevMedia, but don't spend too long because this offer is set to sail into the sunset in less than two weeks.
We're talking about pizza and beer money here... a serious no brainer. RevStudio normally retails for US$249, hence slashing that first digit makes it a serious price-point contender against its rivals. For more information on how the various Rev products differ in terms of features, see here.
Basically, if you don't need seriously geeky things like externals or Oracle database connectivity (and if the mention of these things makes your eyes glaze over, you probably don't need them) and would prefer to be able to deliver a standalone executable application which does not need a player object, RevStudio may be for you. If you don't know what an SSL is, don't spend the extra $$$ on the Enterprise version. Other funky new things I still haven't wrapped my feeble brain around -- datagrid, I'm looking at you! -- you may also not need.
One limitation which must be pointed out is that you can only deliver a standalone application on the same platform that you write it on (but I don't think that precludes delivering for the other platforms using the company's free stack player). In normal human English, this means that if you have a Mac at home, you'd better be making standalones for a classroom of Macs and similarly for the other supported platforms.
Still -- have any oldies but goodies Hypercard stacks you've been trying to bring into the 21st century? Get this product. Fast. Because you can convert them into native Rev stack files (especially plain-vanilla Hypercard stacks without those pesky XCMDs & XCFNs).
Basically, as the company itself so aptly notes, You don't need a computer science degree to get things done with Revolution. So, what are you waiting for?
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Hypercard, Hyperstudio, and why Revolution Can't, or Won't, Compete
It's an interesting component of modern culture that views anything that didn't hatch yesterday as completely obsolete, foreign, and useless for study. This regrettably leads us to recreate the wheel over and over again, and sometimes what results is simply NOT superior to that which preceded it in ways we should have seen coming but didn't because we decided it was uncool to look back in time.
Thus is is with the the Hyper-word that must not be uttered. If all you can look back and see are 1-bit icons and the floppy-swap and are willing to dismiss it at that, then you never really did ever "get it." And, btw, those 1-bit icons were and still are vastly superior to the load of 256-color icon crap that shipped with MetaCard and is shipping still with Rev. You think the Stack - Card metaphor is an embarrassment? Have any of you even LOOKED AT those MC icons?!? They look like they were drawn by 5-year-olds on a few too many acid drops. And, btw, we're talking 5-year-olds with ZERO artistic talent. On acid.
But I digress. When reminded that, at its height, the Hyper-thing was quite possibly THE most popular development environment (Can Rev say that now?) and attracted probably the greatest numbers of non-/novice programmers than any development environment before or since (does anyone even come close btw?), people's responses are: 'but where are they now?', or, 'oh, but those were the days of the floppy-swap,' or the subtly-deceptive argument-changing dismissal that such is the realm of the geriatric set that's clearly not with the program (pardon the pun).
The point that lots of people are blissful to ignore is that Hypercard (there, I've said it!) got lots of things right that, 20 years later, nearly everybody else, including Rev, insists on getting wrong by design (except for a certain competitor whose product sells extremely well). Hypercard succeeded wildly in getting people -- normal humans even! -- to use their *programming* product in a very short period of time. While other people wonder, 'where are those people now?', I wonder, 'how the hell did they do that?!'
And that's why HC is not irrelevant: how the hell did they do that, indeed! We like to think that todays user is so much more computer sophisticated than was the typical user 20+ years ago, a bit of back-patting that study after study indicates is simply dead wrong. We may have more computers in more homes and more schools but, other than surfing the web and sitting on Facebook all day, today's computer owner doesn't use his/her computer for anything markedly more complex or different than did the typical user of 20+ years ago. So, the idea that we need to explain things less because "they" know more? Fail.
20+ years ago the HC team understood that they had to make programming look fun and attractive, with a gentle learning curve and lots of ready-made things to copy <--> paste into new stacks, replete with clipart so that the user didn't get distracted when going off and ending up chasing the pretty butterfly while looking for artwork.
Today many consider such things to be coddling, and new Rev users with questions are tersely told to go read the documentation. I'll say it again: without a printed set of language documentation (WITH AN INDEX), online docs are of EXTREMELY LIMITED VALUE because you can't look up what you don't know to look up. The language model is sufficiently different from other programming languages that even programmers coming from other languages find using the documentation difficult, and people who lack a programming background altogether are likely to find the docs entirely unusable. Which means they drift away, because there's no substantial explanation of how to do things that anchors them. Buh-bye, new user. By design. Because we think they need to grow more hair on their chests and suck it up and become "real" programmers.
Trevor's lessons stuff is a HUGE step in the right direction, but consider this: you have to (a) know they exist to (b) go find them (no small feat, given how wildly Rev's website changes with each new rebranding) and then (c) search them, at which point you've likely lost considerably more than 50% of those new users. Considerably more. Do I need say it again? CONSIDERABLY MORE, like, nearly all of them. The HC dev team knew to have stuff up-front and visible, always and obviously accessible. They even recognized this importance after the development of that new-fangled internet thingy that people keep telling me about (I think I need to go swig a bottle of Geritol before I can grok that whole thing).
So, it would seem that there's a few things we can learn from 20+ years ago -- Don't intimidate people and make them feel stupid; DO give them a small subset of all the things they need to get started without leaving the IDE; DO provide a printed set of language and learning materials; make all this stuff obvious and visible; and speak to them in their, not your, language.
Think I'm going overboard a bit with the clipart & stuff? How many teachers do you think choose Hyperstudio (http://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/) at US$90 over Rev Media, which is FREE? Seems insane, doesn't it?! Visit their website and you'll see why they pick Hyperstudio. In droves. Look at the screenshot: Hyperstudio's not too embarrassed by the blast from the past of using a hand versus an arrow to indicate one particular state or modality over the other, because Hyperstudio knows that you don't use two very similar-looking icons to indicate two very different states. And Hyperstudio knows it because HC knew it. And because Hyperstudio has decided not to be embarrassed by yesterday's truth, they sell way more licenses to normal humans than does Rev, even though I think educators would be better off using Rev.
Hyperstudio also boasts podcasting support, importing from iTunes, Keynote, and YouTube, easy card navigation in its production environment, and text niceties such as kerning (how long have people been drooling for that in Rev?!). Like Rev, it has a plugin allowing Hyperstudio projects to be run in Safari. But, more significantly, it includes 1,300 clipart images, 500 background images, 200 animations, 280 sounds, and 30 movies, including QTVR; it imports PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PICT & PSD for images, and MP3, AAC, WAV (I'll bet it's wayyyy less wonky than Rev is with WAV files), AIFF, M4A, M4B, M4P, SND, CDDA & AU for audio, and MOV, AVI, MPEG and QTVR for movie/video. Now I'm not claiming that Rev needs to match them, number for number, on included media, but it really does need to not be a string of 0s in all those categories if Rev wishes to compete in the educational market. Hyperstudio was smart: It looked at what worked for Hypercard and then did that in spades. It wasn't too cool to look back in time. And it shows because it sells.
And, another reason why educators take to Hyperstudio in droves? It has something else that Hypercard had and Rev sadly does not: a passionate former and current userbase with an emotional connection to the product and the willingness to be unpaid evangelists for the company and the product. And this is a company/product that really doesn't badly need such a thing, having few to no real competitors, unlike Rev, which is up against a bazillion other programming languages, most of which have been around longer and have significantly more adherents. And, as its wiki entry notes, Hyperstudio and its users aren't too proud to acknowledge Hyperstudio as a Hypercard clone. Indeed, on the webpages of Hyperstudio fans you will find frequent mention of Hypercard, and not in a negative manner either. Oh, and did I mention that Hyperstudio is wildly popular? Hmmm.... wonder why.
Higher education, teacher ed programs, and K-12 in general *lurves* Hyperstudio:
http://www.sillybilly.com/abcd123.html
http://www.cue.org/cuetoyou/hyperstudio
http://nschubert.home.mchsi.com/education/HSProjects.html
http://mathforum.org/sum95/suzanne/colortips.html
http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourFames.cgi?tour_id=14179
http://www.k12.hi.us/~mstlaure/tlcf2000/fun_hs.htm
--this site has an example of menus that make sense to educators.
http://geologyonline.museum.state.il.us/tools/lessons/8.6/lesson.pdf
http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej33/m2.html
--this site explains in copious detail why the edu community likes Hyperstudio.
Check out the testimonials and endorsements, and, ask yourself what does Hyperstudio do for $90 that Rev Media, for free, couldn't do better, and then consider why it is Rev currently cannot compete in that market, despite everything we've been able to observe about such software and the success of similar products over the last 20 years.
But, of course, few here care about the education market, so let me appeal to your base, my-bottom-line instincts: how many of your bugs might get fixed with the additional income brought in by hundreds of thousands of teachers buying a slightly modified Studio, based upon what went right with Hypercard?
Is it really worth it to diss Hypercard and its model? I think not.
Thus is is with the the Hyper-word that must not be uttered. If all you can look back and see are 1-bit icons and the floppy-swap and are willing to dismiss it at that, then you never really did ever "get it." And, btw, those 1-bit icons were and still are vastly superior to the load of 256-color icon crap that shipped with MetaCard and is shipping still with Rev. You think the Stack - Card metaphor is an embarrassment? Have any of you even LOOKED AT those MC icons?!? They look like they were drawn by 5-year-olds on a few too many acid drops. And, btw, we're talking 5-year-olds with ZERO artistic talent. On acid.
But I digress. When reminded that, at its height, the Hyper-thing was quite possibly THE most popular development environment (Can Rev say that now?) and attracted probably the greatest numbers of non-/novice programmers than any development environment before or since (does anyone even come close btw?), people's responses are: 'but where are they now?', or, 'oh, but those were the days of the floppy-swap,' or the subtly-deceptive argument-changing dismissal that such is the realm of the geriatric set that's clearly not with the program (pardon the pun).
The point that lots of people are blissful to ignore is that Hypercard (there, I've said it!) got lots of things right that, 20 years later, nearly everybody else, including Rev, insists on getting wrong by design (except for a certain competitor whose product sells extremely well). Hypercard succeeded wildly in getting people -- normal humans even! -- to use their *programming* product in a very short period of time. While other people wonder, 'where are those people now?', I wonder, 'how the hell did they do that?!'
And that's why HC is not irrelevant: how the hell did they do that, indeed! We like to think that todays user is so much more computer sophisticated than was the typical user 20+ years ago, a bit of back-patting that study after study indicates is simply dead wrong. We may have more computers in more homes and more schools but, other than surfing the web and sitting on Facebook all day, today's computer owner doesn't use his/her computer for anything markedly more complex or different than did the typical user of 20+ years ago. So, the idea that we need to explain things less because "they" know more? Fail.
20+ years ago the HC team understood that they had to make programming look fun and attractive, with a gentle learning curve and lots of ready-made things to copy <--> paste into new stacks, replete with clipart so that the user didn't get distracted when going off and ending up chasing the pretty butterfly while looking for artwork.
Today many consider such things to be coddling, and new Rev users with questions are tersely told to go read the documentation. I'll say it again: without a printed set of language documentation (WITH AN INDEX), online docs are of EXTREMELY LIMITED VALUE because you can't look up what you don't know to look up. The language model is sufficiently different from other programming languages that even programmers coming from other languages find using the documentation difficult, and people who lack a programming background altogether are likely to find the docs entirely unusable. Which means they drift away, because there's no substantial explanation of how to do things that anchors them. Buh-bye, new user. By design. Because we think they need to grow more hair on their chests and suck it up and become "real" programmers.
Trevor's lessons stuff is a HUGE step in the right direction, but consider this: you have to (a) know they exist to (b) go find them (no small feat, given how wildly Rev's website changes with each new rebranding) and then (c) search them, at which point you've likely lost considerably more than 50% of those new users. Considerably more. Do I need say it again? CONSIDERABLY MORE, like, nearly all of them. The HC dev team knew to have stuff up-front and visible, always and obviously accessible. They even recognized this importance after the development of that new-fangled internet thingy that people keep telling me about (I think I need to go swig a bottle of Geritol before I can grok that whole thing).
So, it would seem that there's a few things we can learn from 20+ years ago -- Don't intimidate people and make them feel stupid; DO give them a small subset of all the things they need to get started without leaving the IDE; DO provide a printed set of language and learning materials; make all this stuff obvious and visible; and speak to them in their, not your, language.
Think I'm going overboard a bit with the clipart & stuff? How many teachers do you think choose Hyperstudio (http://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/) at US$90 over Rev Media, which is FREE? Seems insane, doesn't it?! Visit their website and you'll see why they pick Hyperstudio. In droves. Look at the screenshot: Hyperstudio's not too embarrassed by the blast from the past of using a hand versus an arrow to indicate one particular state or modality over the other, because Hyperstudio knows that you don't use two very similar-looking icons to indicate two very different states. And Hyperstudio knows it because HC knew it. And because Hyperstudio has decided not to be embarrassed by yesterday's truth, they sell way more licenses to normal humans than does Rev, even though I think educators would be better off using Rev.
Hyperstudio also boasts podcasting support, importing from iTunes, Keynote, and YouTube, easy card navigation in its production environment, and text niceties such as kerning (how long have people been drooling for that in Rev?!). Like Rev, it has a plugin allowing Hyperstudio projects to be run in Safari. But, more significantly, it includes 1,300 clipart images, 500 background images, 200 animations, 280 sounds, and 30 movies, including QTVR; it imports PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PICT & PSD for images, and MP3, AAC, WAV (I'll bet it's wayyyy less wonky than Rev is with WAV files), AIFF, M4A, M4B, M4P, SND, CDDA & AU for audio, and MOV, AVI, MPEG and QTVR for movie/video. Now I'm not claiming that Rev needs to match them, number for number, on included media, but it really does need to not be a string of 0s in all those categories if Rev wishes to compete in the educational market. Hyperstudio was smart: It looked at what worked for Hypercard and then did that in spades. It wasn't too cool to look back in time. And it shows because it sells.
And, another reason why educators take to Hyperstudio in droves? It has something else that Hypercard had and Rev sadly does not: a passionate former and current userbase with an emotional connection to the product and the willingness to be unpaid evangelists for the company and the product. And this is a company/product that really doesn't badly need such a thing, having few to no real competitors, unlike Rev, which is up against a bazillion other programming languages, most of which have been around longer and have significantly more adherents. And, as its wiki entry notes, Hyperstudio and its users aren't too proud to acknowledge Hyperstudio as a Hypercard clone. Indeed, on the webpages of Hyperstudio fans you will find frequent mention of Hypercard, and not in a negative manner either. Oh, and did I mention that Hyperstudio is wildly popular? Hmmm.... wonder why.
Higher education, teacher ed programs, and K-12 in general *lurves* Hyperstudio:
http://www.sillybilly.com/abcd123.html
http://www.cue.org/cuetoyou/hyperstudio
http://nschubert.home.mchsi.com/education/HSProjects.html
http://mathforum.org/sum95/suzanne/colortips.html
http://www.uen.org/utahlink/tours/tourFames.cgi?tour_id=14179
http://www.k12.hi.us/~mstlaure/tlcf2000/fun_hs.htm
--this site has an example of menus that make sense to educators.
http://geologyonline.museum.state.il.us/tools/lessons/8.6/lesson.pdf
http://writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej33/m2.html
--this site explains in copious detail why the edu community likes Hyperstudio.
Check out the testimonials and endorsements, and, ask yourself what does Hyperstudio do for $90 that Rev Media, for free, couldn't do better, and then consider why it is Rev currently cannot compete in that market, despite everything we've been able to observe about such software and the success of similar products over the last 20 years.
But, of course, few here care about the education market, so let me appeal to your base, my-bottom-line instincts: how many of your bugs might get fixed with the additional income brought in by hundreds of thousands of teachers buying a slightly modified Studio, based upon what went right with Hypercard?
Is it really worth it to diss Hypercard and its model? I think not.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
My Revlet Works!!! aka getting the current plugin
Hot damn! It works after all :-D
Turns out that my silly little Plurals program now works online. I thought it didn't but it seems that I didn't have the current plugin. Silly me!
You can find it here
I'm doin' the Snoopy Dance!
Turns out that my silly little Plurals program now works online. I thought it didn't but it seems that I didn't have the current plugin. Silly me!
You can find it here
I'm doin' the Snoopy Dance!
Monday, November 30, 2009
From the FROM GOD'S MOUTH TO OUR EARS department:
"I'm especially impressed with the way you've preserved the same feel and flavor of HyperCard even in all the new features you've added and revised... When I finally got to Revolution it was like coming home again... You have created a very worthy successor to HyperCard, the only one I've seen which captures, preserves and seamlessly extends everything I thought was great about the original." -- Dan Winkler
And to think -- we wouldn't even know about this little gem if not for a recently spectacular little flamefest on the Rev use-list. That flamefest partially reignited the debate regarding whether we should be proud of Revolution's Hypercard origins or ashamed. You can read more about Hypercard here. People who are embarrassed by that lineage should just go away and program in C. Seriously. It's snobbery like that (produced in metric boatloads over on a recent /. thread on Rev ) that keeps people, especially normal humans, from even trying to make their own solutions.
HyperTalk was sufficiently popular that one of its main uses was not as a database, but as a programming tool that empowered ordinary computer users. Thousands of "stacks" were written and distributed as "stackware" in the years when HyperCard was widely available. As stated above, programming "for the rest of us", that is, for non-professionals, allowed many thousands of personal applications to be created by individuals with a need for personal software solutions.
You or I are unlikely to make anything super-duper great, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the world for "little and gets the job done" ;-)
And to think -- we wouldn't even know about this little gem if not for a recently spectacular little flamefest on the Rev use-list. That flamefest partially reignited the debate regarding whether we should be proud of Revolution's Hypercard origins or ashamed. You can read more about Hypercard here. People who are embarrassed by that lineage should just go away and program in C. Seriously. It's snobbery like that (produced in metric boatloads over on a recent /. thread on Rev ) that keeps people, especially normal humans, from even trying to make their own solutions.
From the wikipedia entry above (which is itself ironic given that the first wiki was produced as a Hypercard stack):
You or I are unlikely to make anything super-duper great, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place in the world for "little and gets the job done" ;-)
Sunday, October 4, 2009
TwistAWord Now Available as a Facebook App!
The TwistAWord educational game/app, reviewed below, is now available online in a limited form Facebook web application. Check it out!
http://apps.facebook.com/twistaword/
To play the online version of the game, you will need to download the free web revlet plug-in. The IE browser, notoriously wonky and non-standards compliant, isn't supported by this plug-in, but FireFox and Safari are.
Enjoy!
http://apps.facebook.com/twistaword/
To play the online version of the game, you will need to download the free web revlet plug-in. The IE browser, notoriously wonky and non-standards compliant, isn't supported by this plug-in, but FireFox and Safari are.
Enjoy!
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