CompuServe Messages

CanDo 2.0 sounds great! I'll have to look into adding it to my collection. But while reading this post I got an idea that is crazy enough to be either really great or really dumb. I attended a CECA conference yesterday in Waterbury Ct. The place was loaded with demos of very good educational software. Much of it MAC hypercard stacks. What the Amiga needs is access to all that software! From my observations most of these applications are simple in terms of logic, simply displaying text, graphics, sound files, and/or animations (quicktime) at about 8 frames/sec (my 600 could do better ;)) in reponse to mouse clicks, these resources being organised in some sort of data base. Now the way I see it this could be done it two ways. First a Hypercard converter. This program would read a Hypercard stack and build a CanDo stack that would accomplish the same tasks. It would then access all the resources called for by the stack and convert the graphic files, text files, sound files, animations, etc. to Amiga formats. The end result would be an all Amiga Cando stack that presented the original Hypercard stack's data from Amiga format files. This would probably have to be done at the developer level with all the right licensing agreements etc. OR BETTER YET You could develop a special version of CanDo – say CanDo Plus. This version could read Hypercard stacks. It would generate it's own windows, gadgets, etc. to duplicate the ones generated by Hypercard – sort of an on the fly conversion. Using import modules similar to PageStream it would read the MAC resource files directly, in effect letting you run a Hypercard application in a Cando environment. Either way this would create an explosion in the need for Cando. You would sell a bazillion of em. And the Amiga would gain instant credibility in the educational community. This would be of such importance that I would think that CBM should underwrite its development and support it with drivers for MAC CDroms and/or MAC drives. <continued>