Mac System X 10.4 and Hypercard

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Level 1

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Mac System X 10.4 and Hypercard

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RUN HYPERCARD WITH TIGER. I spent the better part of two days trying to configure Hypercard to Tiger, gave up, erased the harddrive, and installed 10.3.4 ans updated to 10.3.9. The Hypercard error messages were as I recall, "This file is read only", "Where is...(folder in question)", "there is no field named date". Horrible experience. Hypercard as always runs smoothly on 10.3.9.

QUESTION: Will Filemaker Pro be a good substitute for Hypercard? How customizeable is it?

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Oct 22, 2006 10:48 AM

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Answer 1

eww

Level 9

53,052 points

Oct 22, 2006 11:47 AM in response to tom Deupree

Hi, Tom. Without any inkling of what you want to do with Hypercard, it will be hard for anyone to guess whether you might be able to substitute FileMaker for it, or suggest what else might work better. They are very different applications, and whatever you may have created in Hypercard would have to be recreated from scratch in FileMaker. If you are inextricably wedded to Hypercard, you'd better stick with the operating systems it runs in until you find an acceptable substitute and get yourself set up to use it. And have a look at Supercard, if you haven't already.

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Answer 2

Oct 23, 2006 12:40 PM in response to tom Deupree

tom,

As already suggested, we need a bit more info as to what you use HyperCard for.

However, I now use FileMaker for those things I used to use HyperCard for. FileMaker is of course a database tool, so if you use HyperCard for anything different you're going to be disappointed.

The biggest change I had to adapt to (I mean "disappointment" as a very keen HyperTalk programmer) is the lack of any real usable programming environment with FileMaker. Sure it has scripts, that do lots of FileMaker steps, but there's no real freedom that programming provides. All the whizzy effects from HyperCard are gone, but you can mimic some of them with some hard work.

BUT you can use AppleScript within FileMaker, which gives you immense programming potential. And then you can start to use parts of the Unix scripting environment, I'm a long time awk devotee.

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