Thanks for the response.

I thought I would change the thread subject to be more descriptive.

It appears to me both revolution and supercard are contenders; thanks for the heads up on supercard. Philosophically I like the open software approach, but without a critical mass of contributors, the approach is slow.  Nothing like greed, hope and basic survival to spur a small business along. I think open source succeeds because some university professor motivates his students to develop chucks of the vision.  Combine it with a yearly conference for parties and social networking and things can grow. I understand PHP is open source being pushed by people who are tired of microsoft.

I have reviewed both Revolution's and supercard's  technical descriptions on their websites.

It was useful at both sites to have a detailed list of changes one has to go through to import HC stacks.

Supercard did not mention if it has removed the 32k limitation on fields and scripts; revolution brags several times they have. I have massive amounts of code developed to bypass this limitation.

Supercard still doesn't seem to support XCMDs and XFNCs (which was a show stopper for me back in the early 1990's) and those that it can run have to be run under classic (the limitation I am trying to get away from); revolution in contrast claims it does run these externals.

Do I believe any claims? No, I will have to convert some stacks and benchmark for myself.

I like the vision revolution puts forth with cross platform operation and connection into the internet (my wife/son use WINTELs so I can export my creativity to their machines).  The script line: put URL "address" into x; is an attractive command; I have solved this issue using applescript to MS explorer, but it appears Revolution is better integrated with WWW developments, operating systems, XML etc.

I do feel burned by apple with respect to their handling of HC over the years (clairis) and the more recent intel powerbook  dropping classic. Screw me once shame on apple, screw me twice ....  Don't get me wrong, I love my mac and have used apple products exclusively since 1981, but going into the future for the next 50 years (looking at my son's future as well), I suspect I want to migrate towards platform independence.

I noticed revolution uses PHP to set up their website, wonder why they simply didn't make their stacks available. Too Slow?

I have a set of bench marks I run to evaluate new macs before I upgrade my hardware;  I think I will try moving my home  and bench marking stack over to revolution first then try supercard.

Revolution website seems buggy....  heard that somewhere before....  video tutorials didn't play properly even though I installed their recommended codec.  Pointers to other websites were old and need to be cleaned up. I requested an evaluation key on saturday and it hasn't arrived.  I sent them and EMAIL requesting the key and no response.  sigh....

I'll report my lessons learned as time goes on.

Thanks again,

Richard.

Am 13.08.2006 um 16:54 schrieb Isaac Raway:
> neither should PythonCard: both are inspired by (in different
> ways), but can't possibly replace HyperCard.
PythonCard has Dan Winkler working on it, whom most of you will
probably know as the author of HyperTalk. But apart from that, it's
really just an object layer for Python.
> I would say Revolution is your best bet if you want cross platform.
> It's an ...interesting...environment. Honestly, to me it has always
> felt a little buggy. One possibility that I enjoyed playing with a
> bit better was the MetaCard IDE running on top of the Revolution
> core. You might want to look into that.
My general impression of MC is that it's very unixy. It has a lot
of power, but also can be rather cryptic and confusing. Also, it
doesn't support many Mac-specific features since it wants its stacks
to run cross-platform. They mainly support the stuff that makes sense

on all platforms only.
> If you're going Mac only, then SuperCard is probably worth trying.
> I haven't tried it, but it looks like it has a bit more stable
> interface. In Revolution, I always felt like I was playing with a
> prototype.
Apart from being the most Mac-like of the bunch (and the first
HyperCard clone), SuperCard also has a very dedicated developer
working on it, and a great community. Disclaimer: I recently got to
meet the developer, Mark Lucas. So I may be taken in by his personality.
> Actually that's one big point of contention I have with many
> systems that claim to be HyperCard "clones" or inspired by
> HyperCard. In many cases they have no even remotely similar
> database system. Without that, it's just another RAD tool with an
> xTalk, and if that is what people think HyperCard was, then they
> really never understood it. It's a database. I think there are few
> people who remember it, because there are few people who got that.
> Friendly language + simple DB + friendly GUI = magic.
SuperCard basically kept the object model, extending it by multiple
windows. Though it's only one developer (plus a few dedicated users
helping out occasionally), so don't expect miracles... well, not yet,
anyway. They have a demo, I suggest you just try it out.

Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de

-- 

Best Regards,

Richard Talbott
Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory  (JHU/APL)
11100 Johns Hopkins Road   Room 6-9
Laurel, MD  20723-6099
 Phone: 240-228-6593
 Fax:   240-228-5597
 Email: richard.talbott@...