[OT] The problem with programming and how to fix it

[Richmond Mathewson]

Oh, Yes, ToolBook . .

I had to work with ToolBook in 1998 when I was at the UAE University in 
Al Ain, UAE, making EFL "stuff".

Far, far less easy-going than HyperCard.

Sheikh Yer-Bomboms, the chancellor of the University (a man who was 
pointed on merit:
the merit of being one of the sons of Sheikh Zayed al-Nahyan), suddenly 
decided in 1998 that we'd chuck out all
the Macs running system 8 we'd just spent 4 months setting up and 
authoring EFL-ware for with HyperCard
and replace them with IBM-compats running Windows NT.

So, when I wasn't teaching women/girls whose faces I couldn't see, I was 
sitting between a Macintosh and a PC trying to
reimplement all the HyperCard offerings in ToolBook.

This was a major "fag" as a lot of what I had got going in HyperCard (3D 
models of filing cabinets popping open their
draws to reveal Quicktime movies) just did not seem possible with ToolBook.

Arriving in St. Andrews, in Scotland, in 2000, hired to author EFL-ware 
for several Mac labs (which I never did as they
redirected my efforts & we had a fight involving the teachers' Union and 
so on), I discovered Metacard, and less than 2 weeks later found
Runtime Revolution 1.1.1.

At the risk of sounding extremely corny, after 2 sweaty years with 
Toolbook, RunRev was almost like returning home.

 From what I have seen recently, ToolBook seems to have "degenerated" 
from a "proper" programming IDE into some sort
of "PowerPoint on Steroids" for business types.

Richmond.

On 6/8/2018 9:26 pm, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> It isn't.  SuperCard is available exclusively for macOS.  There was an 
> effort in the mid-90s to port to Windows, but funding dried up before 
> it was completed so no useful version ever saw the light of day.
>
> Toolbook is also single-platform, Windows-only.
>
> But most of the others were cross-platform to varying degrees: OMO and 
> Plus were Mac and Windows, Gain Momentum was Unix and Windows, 
> SenseTalk ran on Mac, Windows, and Unix.
>
> LC is unique in its expansion to mobile, though.  And today, even 
> looking beyond xTalks, I don't see any other scripting tool with 
> integrated GUI elements available for as many platforms.
>