Sample projects?

[Mike Yenco]

I just happened to be looking up the entry for shell in SuperCard Help. It says:

"See the shell.proj sample project for some examples of what you can do with this powerful feature."

I do recall looking through such a project back when we first got the native version of SuperCard for Mac OS X, but I don't see it included with SuperCard 4.8 and this reference in the help file seems have been written before we got the .sc45 extension so I'm not sure if the project was ever updated.  Was an updated project hosted back in the old forums? Were there any other sample projects that might still be relevant?  Could they be made available here in the new discussion group or on the SuperCard site?

[Scott]

Shell.proj is really old and IIRC was never updated. It didn't do anything particularly useful (returning things like the current user, man pages, running processes, etc.) other than to demonstrate the then new shell function. It did include an external that formatted the returned man pages to more readable text, but it was PPC only and don't think it was updated either.

As for the rest of the sample projects that were in the forums, I have them, but they are stored without file extensions and named with SQL IDs. So one needs to search for each file's ID in the database to get the name and extension to apply.

We do have a sample files section on the site with the files mentioned in the 4.8 docs that we could use to host other samples if someone wants to help out resurrecting the file properties from the database. At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) I just don't have time to do that.

[Mike Yenco]

Thanks Scott.  I figured it probably hadn't been updated when I saw the reference to a ".proj" extension.  The one useful thing that I recall is that the project showed a top level list of the commands available and let you just browse through them (bringing up the manual page as you made selections). In the absence of the shell.proj, it might be useful to replace the reference to the project in SuperCard Help with at least some tips on how to explore what is possible, perhaps with just some basics, like using the Terminal and typing compgen -A function -abck to get a full list of functions, aliases, built-ins, commands, and keywords (or just using one option at a time if that list is too overwhelming) and then typing: man [insert the term you want to lookup here] to get the manual for any of those and pressing "q" to exit the manual. Not as easy to just casually browse through, but at least it would provide a starting point for exploring what options are available.

[codegreen]

I couldn't locate a copy of the 'official' version, so this is derived from one of Chilton's incomplete pre-release builds with various parts 'colored in' to do what I'm guessing they eventually did.

Lots of stuff had to be tweaked or replaced too, so basically no guarantees.

Please let me know if you find any problems...

Enjoy,

-Mark

[codegreen]

Oops! Just noticed a couple of last-minute cosmetic errors in the arrowkey tab-following code.

Sorry, my bad.

-Mark

[Mike Yenco]

Thanks Mark! The project seems to be working fine and greatly helps to easily lead the horse to the water (which is all that can be done)...  getting it to drink is another matter.  😊 

[codegreen]

So much for 'horse sense'...

;-)

-Mark