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- Organization: Doctoral student, English, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
- Path: sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!fs7.ece.cmu.edu!crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!kz08+
- Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 07:54:21 -0400
- From: Ken Zuroski <kz08+@andrew.cmu.edu>
- Subject: please help
- Message-ID: <714052461.2580.0@hector.mercury.acs.cmu.edu>
- Lines: 69
-
- Hi:
-
- Okay, I suddenly found myself needing a hypertext application for the Macintosh
- that would allow me to link together a diverse variety of ideas and topics
- that I can't even begin to anticipate what they are until they are ready
- to be integrated with the others. Great, I said, I'll look for a shareware
- hypercard stack. I'd be willing to get something commercial, but time is
- of the essence and it would be very easy for me simply to download something
- from one of the archives; I looked about briefly in a few software stores,
- didn't see what I needed, and so would have to order a commercial application
- . Okay. Well, the stack that seemed to fit the bill best of all the
- hypertext applications I was able to find via anonymous ftp was a stack
- called TellingTools, which probably most people working with macs and who
- are reading this newsgroup are familiar with. Great, I said. I started
- inserting the information that I needed into it. However, I find that I
- am having trouble in using the stack. The main problem seems to be that
- the anchors I create within the text I am entering suddenly at one point
- lose their links, and I can't seem to reestablish them after they go away.
- This is very frustrating. The scripting seems to be rather straightforward,
- but unfortunately I don't know the programming language and, more
- importantly for me, I don't have the time to learn it to figure out what
- is going wrong. I need something right away that works and that I don't
- have to tweak to make work.
-
- Okay, right now I am trying to find the most expedient way to solve my
- problem. If there is some minor tweak I can apply to Telling Tools, I'll
- do it. If there are going to be more problems later with this stack, I'd
- just as soon buy something that will work without headaches. So:
-
- 1. Do any of you have any idea why the anchors are losing their links? Is
- it because I try (and fail) to create as anchors words surrounded by quotation marks?
- Is it because I delete a card--maybe that screws up the link order and it
- can't recover. How come I can't get rid of anchors even though I can delete
- the text that they are associated with? And I never have been able to
- remove a link as outlined in the documentation. Working with a Mac SE and
- system 7, Hypercard 2.0.x (x=something).
-
- Okay, there sure are a lot of problems here. Which brings me to my second
- question:
-
- 2. If this is a lost cause, what do you recommend I purchase? I have read
- through this newsgroup, what few messages there are, and a couple of names
- popped out--NoteCard, I think, and HyperPad (?). Are there any others that
- are standardly used for the mac platform? Will these run faster on my SE
- , assuming they are not stacks but stand-alone applications (which it seems
- NoteCard would not be, on second thought), than Hypercard stacks (probably
- so). Where is a good mail order place to purchase the commercial products
- (I am going to call MacConnection to see if they sell these)? How much
- do they run?
-
- Thanks very much for your advice. Essentially I need a hypertext application
- that will allow me to link together a great amount of information in an
- organized way, will allow me to quickly leap from one topic/item to the next.
- The more organizational functions (e.g., "maps" that show how my cards are
- linked together, the ability to classify cards into groups, ala Telling Tools),
- the better.
-
- Email, please; or posting is okay too.
-
- Ken
-
- ---
- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Ken Zuroski
- Department of English
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
- kz08@cmu.edu
- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-