converting HyperCard stacks

[Mike Harland]

Thanks for the suggestions folks!

> On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 04:09  PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
>
>> When Rev closes a stack, it doesn't remove it from memory unless you
>> have set the destroystack property to true. After importing your HC
>> stack, open the Stack Inspector (from the Objects menu) and click the
>> checkbox called "purge stack on close". This will remove it from RAM
>> when you close the stack, and should free up memory so you can open
>> another one.

Yes, I was aware of the memory purging but didn't yet know about the 
Inspector check box, so that is one trick learnt - many thanks.  
Unfortunately I have applied the check box and saved and then even used 
the 'Close and remove from Memory' command  - I then tried opening 
another HC stack and crash it goes again!

> Alex Rice, Software Developer  replied:
>
> Good advice, but on OS X an app should never crash because of low
> memory (however on OS 7,8,9 yes). OS X has a really good virtual memory
> system and running out of RAM the worst thing that should happen is a
> lot of disk activity as the system starts swapping.

Being a form of UNIX that is what I thought  - but I also have 768MB 
RAM on my machine!  The above attempt to purge seems to confirm that.

> Mike, what I was going to recommend is putting breakpoints and stepping
> through all of your startup, openStack, preOpenStack, openCard and
> preOpenCard handlers. Something in one of them is triggering a crash.

I did think the HC coding might be another problem, as you say, since I 
have used external functions and password protection on some stacks.  
But once I have imported the stack and converted to RR there is 
absolutely no problem with crashing, so I still assume it must be a 
memory purging or conversion factor. Open RR, import stack, save and 
Quit - Open RR, import stack, save and Quit  - ad infinitum - 
absolutely no problems!

I shall continue to use my work-around as it is no great time loss, but 
the RR techies might like to take note.

Still tons better than the original Hypercard/SuperCard/ToolBook apps I 
had tried before and far more user-friendly than Director and 
Authorware which I have battled with endlessly for multimedia authoring 
projects. Glad to see the great Rinaldi of HC XCmd fame is still around 
and of the same opinion!

Cheers,
Mike