Re: Developer's Tools (was Re: Archives and Web Site)

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

> I think a program to translate Visual Basic programs to something native to 
> Linux would be a useful tool.  It would allow VB programs to be brought over 
> without having to be re-written, and they could then be maintained and extended 
> on Linux.  However, I don't think VB is widely used by educators in designing 
> courseware (if I'm wrong, please correct me).  HyperCard used to be the program 
> of choice for such things, and now I believe it's HyperStudio.
> 
> The closest thing to those currently available on Linux is MetaCard 
> <http://www.metacard.com>, a commercial product.  It looks quite useful, and 
> they have reasonable educational prices.

I've been trying to figure out just what HyperStudio does that 
makes it special.  Certainly the hypertext notion of linking and 
whatnot is good, but the web can do that.  And if you do it on the 
web, you are working on a peer level with the rest of the world 
instead of with a specially educationally-oriented product like 
HyperStudio.

Now, HyperStudio does have a nice WYSIWYG interface, semi-
dynamic content, a layout-oriented (vs. structural) design, all 
packaged in a single file.

But the WYSIWYG for HTML is certainly possible.  I don't know 
what things are out their -- I've really only used Netscape 
Composer, which looks like a word processor more than a desktop 
publishing program.  Having an underlying structural basis in HTML 
isn't that bad, and is worth the benefit of being able to share.

The dynamic things you can do with HyperStudio aren't all that 
impressive.  I'm working with HyperLogo right now and it's pissing 
me off terribly.  The alternative is HTML is CGI scripting, 
JavaScript, and perhaps some of the shockwave (etc.) stuff.  I don't 
know JavaScript (or Java), but I imagine that it has the potential to 
do the rest of what HyperStudio does.  It would have to be 
integrated in the WYSIWYG editor for it to be accessible.


The impression I've gotten is that HyperStudio has succeded more 
due to marketing than any particular educational or technical virtue. 
But isn't that always the story :-/


I think the web is a better replacement for HyperStudio than Visual 
Tcl would probably be (though I haven't looked at vtcl).  I think 
content, not behavior, is at the core of what people try to do with 
HyperStudio.  A programming environment (like vtcl) is suited well 
to complicated behavior, but the web is better suited to content -- 
it's platform-neutral (more or less -- I assume anything people 
would make under Linux would be platform-neutral), easily 
distributed (its most powerful benefit), and ubiquitous (per my 
previous arguments against KidPrograms).


--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>