Best Way to Learn SuperCard

[cmclane]

I would be grateful for any advice on how to learn SuperCard. I have read portions of the User Guide and they talk in general about all the features of SuperCard and what you can do with it, but they don't have deeper discussions of how to do things and very few script examples. (I realize that most user guides don't do this, so I'm not complaining; I'm simply saying that I have looked there and not found the kind of help I need.)

Working through the Help System is not helpful for broader scripting concepts because is is a word-by-word search process. It's like trying to learn to build an airplane by reading the dictionary and looking for aeronautical engineering words.

There used to be SuperCard books on the market but those are out of print. There used to be several websites with example projects, but most of those are 404.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

- Charlie

[jen...@adelaide.on.net]

Hi Charlie

My advice:

1. Ask for help on this discussion list.

Or just keep reading the discussion list and learn from questions and answers.

For example, Mark has put up some good scripts lately.

2. Look at the scripts of other people's SC projects.

If you are having trouble finding a good source of SuperCard projects, then you can also look for repositories of HyperCard and LiveCode/Revolution/RunRev stacks.

Although HyperTalk and revTalk aren't identical to SuperTalk, they are similar enough to adapt scripts easily.

For example, here are a couple of links from the results of quick web searches for "hypercard stacks" and "livecode stacks":

https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks

http://livecodeshare.runrev.com

Peter Jenkins

[codegreen]

I wish I had something you want to hear to offer here, but FWIW all you really need to do to learn SuperTalk inside out is to use the SuperScript RTE utility to export the scripts of the SharedFile and the various components of the Runtime Editor, print them out, and then read them over and over until they make sense. Whenever you get to a part you don't grasp, stick a trace at the start of it and step through it to see how it works. And if you still have questions, ask.

This may sound daunting, but it's actually how I learned SuperTalk myself thirty-three years ago, all in one terrifying/exhilarating night (except back then there was no SuperScript or User Forum or Language Guide or any other documentation or resource to help). So while I'm not saying it's a cakewalk, I know for a fact it's totally doable (in a single sitting!) if you want/need it badly enough.

Those scripts often don't take full advantage of recent language enhancements and can be a bit baroque (since they're designed to work in spite of users' own code) but they implement everything you need to build a full-fledged app using SC. Once you start making standalones you'll need to scarf a lot of this stuff and slim it down for your own UI, so everything you'll learn from this study is essential if you ever want to move beyond just running projects under the RTE...

The other thing I found really helpful was to print out my own scripts, and then spread them out on the floor around me while I was watching TV or hanging out with friends or whatever and mark them up. Again and again I would think I'd stripped some feature down to its bare essentials, only to suddenly note out of the corner of my eye during a commercial or while reaching for my beer or whatever that there was some optimization I'd missed when staring at the issue head-on. This (i.e., practice) is how you internalize a programming language and learn to think clearly in it.

HTH,

-Mark

[Charles McLane]

​Thanks for this advice Peter and for the links under Item 2. Regarding Item 1, I have found that a number of the SC Forum posts that turn up in my internet searches that look like they would answer my questions​ are no longer available.

Does anyone know if former posts are going to eventually be put up on the Forum or made available in an archived section somewhere? Or should I just ask the same question again?

- Charlie

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[Charles McLane]

This does help Mark. Yes, it's work; but at least it's a plan. I can learn a lot from what is already available under the hood in different components; and I will understand when I look at them that there may be a reason that they look different from the way I might script something for one of my projects. If I have questions about that when I see it, I can ask. I'll deal with any Standalone issues/questions later because I'm a good ways off from that.

Thanks also for the advice to actually print my scripts out to edit and fine tune them. I'll keep plugging away!  Thanks again.

- Charlie

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[Vince]

Charlie, you are not the first to notice this problem. Examining projects from other users is one way to see how people do different things, but since we switched to this google board, the vast repository of projects from the old site is lost. I suppose people can reload those here, but it would be scatter-shot and difficult.  (Might be a burning need for some kind of repository for projects that would take the place of the file upload section of the previous BBS Scott used. I don't know if something like github would work for this, but it is certainly something worth discussing, or would the tagging system here be useful for this?) There is the Supercard Help - Add On system for which some people did small help projects that covered specific topics like Drag n' Drop, Button Basics, etc. Nothing that takes you through all things that are possible with SC.

Unfortunately there aren't any user programming books for SC — the last one published was 1995 and is out of print. I have a copy of that book and it is good for showing you general principles but it is so out of date that a new user would probably just be confused.

Vince

[C.M. Keuper]

Instead of a bottom up approach, try a top down approach. Pick something you would like SuperCard to do for you, and then start working on it, getting help as you need it.

[Joe Koomen]

Hi Vince. I have Inside SuperCard which was printed in 1990. Which SC book was published in 1995?

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Joe Koomen

[Haroldo Mauro]

I find help from this list used to be better. I might be wrong, but it seems to me you don´t get answers for simple questions as ready as for advanced stuff. I’ve posted a simple question 19 hours ago… so far no answers. Believe me, I wouldn’t bother the list with easy stuff if I could find help from the Supercard documentation. Unfortunately neither the User Guide nor the Help file can explain.

H. Mauro

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[Vince]

Yeah — that's the one I have, Joe. My 'SC trivia memory' ain't what it used to be! ; )

On Thursday, July 5, 2018 at 10:30:13 AM UTC-5, joekoomen wrote:

Hi Vince. I have Inside SuperCard which was printed in 1990. Which SC book was published in 1995?

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 10:17 AM, 'Vince' via SuperCard Discussion <superca...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Charlie, you are not the first to notice this problem. Examining projects from other users is one way to see how people do different things, but since we switched to this google board, the vast repository of projects from the old site is lost. I suppose people can reload those here, but it would be scatter-shot and difficult.  (Might be a burning need for some kind of repository for projects that would take the place of the file upload section of the previous BBS Scott used. I don't know if something like github would work for this, but it is certainly something worth discussing, or would the tagging system here be useful for this?) There is the Supercard Help - Add On system for which some people did small help projects that covered specific topics like Drag n' Drop, Button Basics, etc. Nothing that takes you through all things that are possible with SC.

Unfortunately there aren't any user programming books for SC — the last one published was 1995 and is out of print. I have a copy of that book and it is good for showing you general principles but it is so out of date that a new user would probably just be confused.

Vince

On Wednesday, July 4, 2018 at 9:09:49 PM UTC-5, cmclane wrote:

I would be grateful for any advice on how to learn SuperCard. I have read portions of the User Guide and they talk in general about all the features of SuperCard and what you can do with it, but they don't have deeper discussions of how to do things and very few script examples. (I realize that most user guides don't do this, so I'm not complaining; I'm simply saying that I have looked there and not found the kind of help I need.)

Working through the Help System is not helpful for broader scripting concepts because is is a word-by-word search process. It's like trying to learn to build an airplane by reading the dictionary and looking for aeronautical engineering words.

There used to be SuperCard books on the market but those are out of print. There used to be several websites with example projects, but most of those are 404.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

- Charlie

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Joe Koomen

[Vince]

Hi Harold,

To be fair, I think you need to consider a few points.  First, you have a dwindling number of SC users compared to 5 years ago. And for many who remain there are other things that may be more important to them than SC — like getting ready to retire! (lol) Seriously, I've been using SC from its initial release and I recently upgraded. But most of the things I use it for are small personal projects. I just don't have the time for lenghty days of programming. But my decreasing use is also causing me to be less familiar with some of the coding issues. (or even simple things like importing a bundle external)

I read your recent post, but since I 'wrote off' using snd files as a dinosaur format a long time ago and because I don't really use sound much in SC anymore, I couldn't help you. With fewer rabid SC users/coders out there, you probably aren't going to get an answer in an hour like the old days. But thankfully, Scott and Mark still seem to have SC rabies, so I'm sure help will be forthcoming.

Vince

[Haroldo Mauro]

Thanks. I haven’t read my emails for several days. I too use Supercard for personal projects. I don’t necessarilly need snd files. It could be any type as long as I can have it included in a standalone. The user guide says one can have sounds saved in the resource fork of the project and mentions snd files. Anyway, what I  want is a short song played when a certain condition is met, but I dont want to have a separate audio file do that.

Harold

H. Mauro

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[Mike Yenco]

Standalones are not really a single file anymore.  They are a folder with a collection of data inside them that just appear and behave like a single file.  You can go through your Applications folder on your Mac and control-click on any .app and you will see a menu item to "Show Package Contents".  If you do that, you will find a "Contents" folder and inside that a "Resources" folder... and that folder may contain a variety of support files... there might be graphics or icons that make up parts of the user interface, there might be video files, there might be audio files.

So unless you are only dealing with a SuperCard project and don't want some external file to that, as long as your end target is going to be a standalone .app,  you could save some work and just include that file in the resources folder (which you can automatically add in with Standalone Maker) when you build the app.  The project itself actually also ends up in that Resources folder in the bundle .app so you can just reference ANYTHING in there by getting the project path and then tacking on the file you need.  Here is an example of part of a script I use in my apps to play a sound whenever a feedback message is sent:

put projPath(this proj) & "Y Complete.aif" into tSoundPath

play sound file tSoundPath

[Haroldo Mauro]

Yes, I’ve noticed that standalones are packages now, but I’m building a Standalone from Supercard 4.7. I’d like to learn how to have music (from mp3, aiff, whatever…) imported into the resource fork of the project. By the way, I sent to a friend a Standalone made with 4.8.  He told me he got an error message when tried to open. Then, he opened the pagage (Show Contents…) and was able to run from the actual project saved inside.

Thank you.

Harold

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[codegreen]

On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 2:16:14 PM UTC-4, Haroldo Mauro wrote:

Yes, I’ve noticed that standalones are packages now, but I’m building a Standalone from Supercard 4.7. 

4.7 standalones are packages too.

FWIW I was recently shocked to discover that there is a member of this forum who's been using SuperCard even longer than I have yet has never built a standalone, and the mere mention of doing so made him go pale (at least he sounded awfully pale on the phone... ;-).

I never really grasped why people find this simple process so confusing and traumatic, likely because I had to figure out how to do it the very first time I used SuperCard (so it never seemed like an advanced topic) and because I've never been afraid of the Script Tracer (apparently another common source of nameless dread among novices). 

However I certainly can't deny that given the dearth of related documentation it requires a non-trivial amount of celestial navigation and tooth enamel to figure out how to set up a project for use in an editable standalone (which is usually what people want to build first, so they can patch inevitable glitches). Until scripters actually try this they usually have no idea how much code in the Runtime Editor they've come to take for granted, and so are flummoxed that they suddenly have no File or Edit menus and none of their trusty keyboard shortcuts work.

So even when newbies succeed at making their first standalone, FWICT their initial reaction is typically something along the lines of "Aw man, this SUCKS!" because lots of things which until then they didn't even realize required code suddenly don't work, and there's no easy way to fix them in situ (or even any documentation explaining what's missing or where to look for it).

Basically that means all the prayer and fasting required to work out those arcane details gets conflated in their minds with the much smaller learning curve needed to just make the standalone itself, because without those familiar services they're totally unhorsed...

I got to wondering today whether having a simple editable standalone 'template' project into which people could just basically paste their own stuff (deleting anything they didn't need) would help ease this pain. The idea would be to wrap up all the nasty bits of replicating the basic UI services provided by the RTE in a nice little bow, so when first-timers converted their project to a standalone they wouldn't feel so lost. Most projects won't require everything in it (especially in their final non-editable standalone form) but the parts are relatively independent, and hopefully can serve as jumping-off points for their simplified final incarnations.

Unfortunately of course I'm not very good at this point at figuring out how beginners think, and I don't want to overcomplicate things to the point where they can't figure out how anything works. Plus I'm guessing there's lots of folks here who build standalones much more often than I do these days and have their own bags of cool tricks for this environment.

So here's a first swipe at a really bare-bones editable standalone template project. You can build it into an editable standalone as-is to look around, but in practice the idea is for you to delete the last window and then paste in your own. It's designed for SC4.8, but you should be able to use it with 4.7x if you replace the externals in it with their counterparts from the 4.7 SharedFile.

There's no rocket science here, just the basics (largely scarfed from the RTE but updated with modern variable-naming) of how to implement standard keyboard shortcuts, manage the Font, Edit, and Text menus, and supply normal message box behavior. Anyone who wants to chime in on whether it helps them or how it could be improved is strongly encouraged to do so...

HTH,

-Mark

 

[Alec Hole]

My first experience of making a standalone wasn't too bad, although I can see why it could be daunting. However, since Apple have introduced extra security features (Not being able to change the app file itself in the Apps folder), standalone applications have become a lot trickier to make... you can't save any data to the project itself when it is an app so you need to save the state of the UI in a separate file and then load it back in, i.e. when you open a window. All this stuff is handled automatically in projects but needs quite a lot of extra code for a standalone.

Alec

[codegreen]

Okay first suggested patch...

The style of the anchor window was supposed to have been palette or custom palette.

I set it in the standalone, then forgot to copy it back to my master. 

This glitch highlights an ongoing non-trivial 'human error' opportunity which you should always try to keep in mind when working with editable packaged standalones (i.e., the standalone's main.sc45 is only a COPY of your master project). Even forewarned eventually you too will make the same stupid mistake, I promise... ;-)

-Mark

[codegreen]

Here's an update with a few minor bug fixes, plus support for most of the RTE contextual menus (including Help system access).

HTH,

-Mark

[codegreen]

And you can now open the Object Browser by pressing Control-O.

-Mark

[joekoomen]

Hi Mark,

I was looking at your Editable Standalone Template project and was wondering what the ObjectBrowser CRtn was for. When I tried to open the project up with SuperScript, the project was greyed out so I couldn't select it. I quickly discovered that I have a bunch of other projects that can't be opened by SuperScript, but are otherwise editable in both SuperCard and SuperEdit. They all have the proper file extension (.sc45) so I'm a bit puzzled. Could this be related to file types? I noticed that the ones the SuperScript recognizes have the MDOx file type, but the file type on the others has been left blank...

[codegreen]

Here's another update with a few more tweaks.

This version is smart enough to only load its RTE-replacement shims when running as a standalone, so when opened in the regular runtime environment it should behave just as your original did before you pasted it into the template (instead of fighting with the RTE over events and messages).

One more thing I should probably explicitly note is that this template model will NOT play nice with code that refers to windows or menus by number, and doesn't like having windows or menus inserted ahead of its own! So don't do that...

-Mark

[codegreen]

On Monday, July 9, 2018 at 3:47:06 PM UTC-4, joekoomen wrote:

I was looking at your Editable Standalone Template project and was wondering what the ObjectBrowser CRtn was for. When I tried to open the project up with SuperScript, the project was greyed out so I couldn't select it. I quickly discovered that I have a bunch of other projects that can't be opened by SuperScript, but are otherwise editable in both SuperCard and SuperEdit. They all have the proper file extension (.sc45) so I'm a bit puzzled. Could this be related to file types? I noticed that the ones the SuperScript recognizes have the MDOx file type, but the file type on the others has been left blank...

It is indeed caused by that. I’ve suggested to Scott (who's the keeper of this beastie) several times that we should change that script to also use a file extension, but so far no luck… ;-)

In the meantime you can fix this easily enough in the Terminal, like so:

SetFile -c RUNx -t MDOx <posixPathToFile>

HTH,

-Mark 

[codegreen]

There'll be an update to SuperScript in the next release to add multi-file export (for use with Scott's new script export/import utility) which should fix this annoying glitch once and for all (by adding filtering by extension and UTI to the open panel).

In the meantime if anyone is aware of other places in the RTE where this issue exists, please let us know ASAP so I can get a fix into 4.8.1b1.

Thanks,

-Mark

[Maria Phillips]

"I never really grasped why people find this simple process [of building a standalone] so confusing and traumatic, . . .”   I can answer that: SuperCard needs a manual.  A book came with one of the early Hypercard versions and at least 4 or 5 books appeared with later versions.  Those books made it effortless and rewarding to learn HyperTalk and to take advantage of new upgrades as they appeared.  My guess is that it was those books that kept growing Hypercard’s user base while reinforcing its already loyal following. 

Thus:  Put out a SuperCard manual.  It could be self published and maybe not that overwhelming a project. The format of the first Hypercard book is there to copy, and the NavIndex is there to copy with a little editing.  Maybe some college kids could be brought on to help. But the book should, I suggest, be in two parts:  Part 1, to elucidate the fundamental programing elements of SuperCard that are similar to those of early HyperTalk, and thus attract new users similar to those who glommed quickly onto Hypercard. Part 2, to elucidate SuperCard’s bells and whistles.  

The SuperCard manual and application could be promoted via deals from Groupon and New Atlas, etc. 

Just a thought from someone who would love to, but doesn’t have much time to, grapple with new stuff.  

Maria

On Jul 8, 2018, at 6:37 PM, 'codegreen' via SuperCard Discussion <superca...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On Sunday, July 8, 2018 at 2:16:14 PM UTC-4, Haroldo Mauro wrote:

Yes, I’ve noticed that standalones are packages now, but I’m building a Standalone from Supercard 4.7. 

4.7 standalones are packages too.

FWIW I was recently shocked to discover that there is member of this forum who's been using SuperCard even longer than I have yet has never built a standalone, and the mere mention of doing so made him go pale (at least he sounded awfully pale on the phone... ;-).

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<Editable Standalone Template.sc45.zip>

[Michael Tesh]

I second Maria Phillips' suggestions on a SuperCard manual --- particularly regarding language which (of course) changes over time.  I hesitate to stay with it at this point because it's difficult to keep up with the changes if they are not systematically documented.

Sent from my iPad

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[Scott]

I'd like to know what you feel is not systematically and well documented in the language guide.