From: Eric Engle (engleerica_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 13:44:54 PDT
There is a demo of newtcard available somewhere with disabled scripting and it
is buggy - unexpected system restarts etc. NS Basic on the other hand is very
nice. Its not that newtcard has a weaker scripting language. Its just that you
can do anything you would want in newtcard with NS Basic and with no system
crash. Newtcard really disappointed me. Hypernewt is another thing that looks
promising but isn't: it just lets you put hyperlinks on your newt - it does not
build hypercard stacks or read them.
As I said, I just had the newtcard demo, it was buggy adn did not allow
scripting, but I believe scripting was disabled. I mean, why would it not
include the NS basic scripting engine? Being said, why bother? You can do
everything you would want from NS Basic it is definitely *not* hypertalk and
you can use various widgets to get you pict and snd resources (or at least the
newton equivalents: which should actually be fairly easy to export).
For what its worth: if you really love newton and hypercard here is an idea.
Its not a cheap or easy one but would make you a hero and even some money. Get
NS basic for newton, the palm and wince. Get the file format for hypercard.
Write your own hypercard for newt. Make it exportable. Then port it to NS basic
for wince and palm. Then sell it to revolution (runrev.com I believe). No one
has made a hypercard for any palmtop except newtcard and for the reasons I've
given its very disappointing.
There are two things I would pay serious money for on a newt:
1) Ability to create and export movies as quicktime or MPEG.
2) Abilitiy to read and write hypercard or revolution stacks. (revolution can
read hypercard stacks fine but hypercard cannot read revolution stacks once
revolution modifies the hypercard stack except maybe for text I've never tested
that).
I'm sorry I cannot directly answer your scripting question: I expect the script
engine in NS basic and NewtCard is identical. However I would personally buy NS
basic over newtcard.
You *can* contact NS basic about this. They happily answered whether you can
buy all three flavors of NS basic as a package and get a cheaper deal (Yes!)
would probably bundle newtcard too for a reasonable surcharge (so you could
test and compare and possibly port) and also answered my most important
question:
How portable is an NS Basic program for newt to wince or palm? The answer is:
the resources will have to be exported and reimported by hand. Some minor code
will have to be modified. But its basically a flavor of good old GW Basic (so
it seems to me... at any rate its a standard basic) so porting the code from
one platform to another will not be difficult except for widgets which would
have to be done by hand.
I hope this helps.
Eric
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