How to make a square topped, round rect bottomed graphic?

[Richard Gaskin]

Bob Earp wrote:

> Wasn't this the Trace tool in SC ?  You were always impressed with
> that ;-)
>
> Seeing it was in SC, I would have thought somebody that still has SC
> and is a lot brighter than the two of us put together, could "extract"
> and clone the appropriate script.

If memory serves that was in SuperEdit, so it wasn't scripted but 
instead was implemented in C (or maybe Assembler, as Mr. Appleton wrote 
a lot of his code in 68k back in those days).

The algo may have been borrowed from SuperPaint, which was from the same 
publisher (Silicon Beach Software) and I believe a couple of elements 
were common between the two programs.

There was a fair bit of co-mingling back on those days with SBS 
products.  The sound engine in World Builder came from SBS' Dark Castle 
game, for example.  And there are others - here's some trivia for SC fans:


SBS published Personal Press, a page layout program that sold for a 
fraction of what PageMaker cost.  When SBS was acquired by Aldus to 
become Aldus Consumer Division, there was a bit of a sense of 
competition between the Personal Press and PageMaker teams.

Christopher Watson worked on both SuperCard and Personal Press, and did 
something the PageMaker team had been wanting to do for a long time:  he 
gave it a scripting engine.

He ported the SuperTalk interpreter to Personal Press, so you could 
write all sorts of very powerful scripts to automate your production 
workflows.  I had a copy of Personal Press, and used to love being able 
to script it to do all sorts of things for the office I was working in 
at the time.  Good stuff.

Since SC was already so mature by then it was a relatively easy port, 
and he told me that when he sent it up to the main Aldus office to show 
it off to the PageMaker team they were not thrilled to have been bested 
so decisively by such a modest product made by a much smaller team. :)

Another xTalk success story.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
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