Felines

[richmond62]

Wow:
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[stam]

More wow as to why you’d give Diltiazem to a cat!

[richmond62]

Dunno: my cat prefers LiveCode.

At least, considering the way she jumps on the keyboard when I'm programming . . .

[richmond62]

"Diltiazem is a calcium channel blocker. It works by relaxing the muscles of your heart and blood vessels.
Diltiazem is used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure), angina (chest pain), and certain heart rhythm disorders."

NEVER going to give that to a cat!

"Diltiazem is used in cats to treat supraventricular tachyarrhythmia, hypertension, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It may reduce myocardial oxygen demand and prolong ventricular filling time. It is considered a good choice for heart-rate reduction in cats with atrial fibrillation."

Cripes! If any of my cats get that ill it is probably kinder to put them to sleep.

[richmond62]

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I have finally tracked down HyperCard 3 . . .

[stam]

Cripes! If any of my cats get that ill it is probably kinder to put them to sleep.

It's a common drug in humans and relatively tame. I read up the same indications as well - i guess hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy would be the main use-case, treating a cat with that condition with Diltiazem would likely make it less short of breath, as is the case with humans as well... so not out of the question. It really is quite tame otherwise as side effects go.
I just never considered the possibility of cats getting this condition as well! (affects 1:500 humans, so relatively common)

[jacque]

Speaking of HyperCard, I'm giving a talk at the conference next week on how to port old HC stacks to LiveCode. There may still be a few of you out there.

[richmond62]

I have 'ported' 3 HyperCard stacks by running them on a PPC Mac Mini and copying bits of code and copying functionality where scripts didn't work.

[jacque]

I have 'ported' 3 HyperCard stacks by running them on a PPC Mac Mini and copying bits of code and copying functionality where scripts didn't work.

There are more direct ways.

[FourthWorld]

I have 'ported' 3 HyperCard stacks by running them on a PPC Mac Mini and copying bits of code and copying functionality where scripts didn't work.

Why not just open them in LC?

Bug #8169 was fixed a couple months ago in v9.6.6:
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8169

[richmond62]

That was about 17 years ago.

Also . . .

I wrote those HyperCard stacks in 1994 . . . coming from PASCAL & BASIC with all sorts
of presuppositions and so forth . . .

by 2005 I was rather better with xTalk (having spent a lot of time over my MSc thesis which revolved around
Runtime Revolution) than I was in 1994.

So, I saw how awful and clunky my coding was in 1994, and I also saw how awful and clunky Hypercard 2.4 was
compared with whatever version of RR/LC I was working with in 2005.

Having romantic glints in one's eyes re HyperCard is similar to the romantic glints I have in
my eyes for my Mother's Olivetti portable typewriter I used at University in 1983-6: lovely
from an emotional, warm-fuzzy point of view: but I would not swap this (a 2006 iMac) or
that (my 2018 Mac Mini at home) for that clanky, old machine, for all the tea in China.

Recently I looked at a load of HC stacks I ran up for the EFL tank at the UAE University in 1997-9
and realised a number of things:

1. Certainly NOT up to any of my more recent efforts at interface design.

2. Dependent on QuickTime.

3. No Unicode.

4. Badly coded.

5. Possibly about right for 1996 in a marginal country very near to the edge of the world, but . . .

6. Not even up to the standard of what I did when I worked with ToolBook between 1999-2001.
And, quite frankly, the only reason I used ToolBook V was that my employers sat me down in front
of a machine running Windows 2000 and ToolBook V and said "get on with it." ToolBook did absolutely
nothing for me whatsoever . . . moving from that to MetaCard, and a month later, Runrime Revolution,
gave me a huge sense of relief. ToolBook has, as far as I can tell, gone the way of what
my father termed "a plastic bathtoy" or PowerPoint knockoff.

7. Any of those HC stacks that I felt contained anything of value I found I could both
duplicate and improve in LiveCode very quickly indeed; and, by forcing myself (did not take
much force at all) to start afresh with LiveCode, I forced myself to look at them in a considerably
more critical fashion than had I just 'run them through the mincer'.

----------------

This NOT meant to denigrate Jacque's efforts (or anyone else's) to convert HyperCard stacks directly,
especially as I can see the appeal of that with stacks that contain a vast number of objects with
long, complex and interconnected code (which none of my HC stacks ever had).

What this is meant to be is a "stop and think before you jump into the swimming pool" sort
of exercise.

[jacque]

This NOT meant to denigrate Jacque's efforts (or anyone else's) to convert HyperCard stacks directly,
especially as I can see the appeal of that with stacks that contain a vast number of objects with
long, complex and interconnected code (which none of my HC stacks ever had).

To be honest, I had planned to sit back and enjoy the conference this time with no effort on my part but I was conscripted to do the talk.

There were many good HC coders back in the day where direct conversion to LC would be easy. The stack I chose as an example was well written for HC but contained nearly all the syntax issues that had to be addressed. HC was far more accommodating in what you could do with variables and literals, and lacked most of the features LC has, so scripts were by necessity long and convoluted. My talk covers how to easily find and correct those things.

[richmond62]

how to easily find and correct those things

That is useful.

[richmond62]

Oh, and, re ToolBook:
-

-
https://www.sumtotalsystems.com/toolbook

Another also-ran bites the dust.

Mind you, ToolBook went downhill quite sometime ago: moving from what it was at versions 5 and 6:

a Windows-only coloured knock-off of HyperCard,

to a 'learning content' thing, which was neither one thing nor the other: PowerPoint or a proper
programmable IDE.

SumTotal have now replaced it with something called dominKnow which is a sort of e-learning
thingy based on a PowerPoint model with not much elbow room for any kind of programming
as such.

[richmond62]

Personally, I find it a bit worrying that LiveCode has no real competitors at the moment.

No need of any HyperCard at the moment:
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