OpenXTalk Forums

Have we never covered HyperNext Studio in this Implementations section?

I can't remember if I've ever tried it myself, and if I did it was probably two decades ago.
Reading through some of the docs it is clearly xTalk/xCard oriented thing.
There's Win 11 and Android support so that's nice.

HyperNext released an update in March:
https://www.tigabyte.com/hnfiles/downloads.html
That only lists a Windows version, which is a bummer to me, still being Win-resistant.
As far as I can tell macOS support stopped at macOS 10.10 Yosemite and there's no Linux support.

If you are familiar with modern BASICs then you will be pleased to know that HyperNext programs can create and run RBscripts. RBscript is a subset of the modern Object Oriented programming language REALbasic which has many similarities to Visual Basic. REALbasic is developed by REAL Software and there are many REALbasic resources readily available on the internet:

It can output RBScript, that's interesting. These days RealBASIC is now called Xojo soI wonder if it still supports this scripting language, perhaps under a new name? RealBasic/Xojo is another one I never really given a fair go at.

I've just been going down xTalk related wormholes this rainy Sat. morning, new X-men (97) cartoon playing in background, coffee, pop-tart in hand ... feels a bit like the 1990s

Malkom, the chap who makes HyperNext all by himself, seems to have stopped responding to correspondence about 4 years ago.

However, it is obvious to me that he has probably fallen foul (like SuperCard, and so on) of Apple going 64-bit only (what a bunch of @#$%^&*s!).

What he did tell me when last we corresponded was that his 'market' was largely educationalists in Britain, and as high schools in Britain 99% of the time use Windows only I understand why he is concentrating his efforts there.

He started on a Linux version but got so badly bogged down he gave it up.

For a very long time he was developing HyperNext with a free version of RealBASIC (currently not called 'Prince'); but I am not sure how he is doing things at the moment.

--------

This reminds me of when I was doing my second Master's degree at the "University" of Abertay in Dundee. As ALL the work we were doing was Windows-based, I was running Visual Basic at home inside Virtual PC running Windows Millenium on a G3 Mac (with a G4 processor swapped in) under MacOS X 10.3. My "lecturer" at Abertay said she could not understand what was wrong with me as:

1. I could 'just' install Windows on my computer at home.

2. Everyone used Windows.

She also fell in love with me in a major way when I pointed out that the Visual BASIC she was teaching us was wrong, that, at 41 I did not appreciate being spoken to like a nursery school child with wet pants, and that there was nothing wrong with me fiddling around with a slide rule in her lecturers as they had no value anyway.

richmond62 wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 2:34 pm For a very long time he was developing HyperNext with a free version of RealBASIC (currently not called 'Prince'); but I am not sure how he is doing things at the moment.

Reading through the website it seems he's if he is still working on it (which as I said there's a release from March 2024), he's probably building it with VisualStudio, VisualBasicScript (similar to RB ), and/or C#

While I appreciate being a rebel like that, re: running Win on PowerPC, it was painfully slow to do so in emulation, a much more tolerable way was that there were co-processor cards like OrangePC PCI card or the earlier 486 PDS-slot cards, which allowed Win to run simultaneously inside MacOS at Win native speed.

Anyway, it was a thread YOU started elsewhere in 2018, that I was I visiting on my wormhole travels, that led to this post about the update. Similar to other threads you've started comparing various xTalk/xCard environments. They're interesting when thinking of how things could be fo our FOSS xTalk/xCard here.

I'm now thinking a lot about 'stack ideas' (HC) and stack template sort of things, and ideas such as 'click-scripts' but maybe more of a scripting snippets,Scripter's Scrapbook sort of way, like the image libraries or the objects libraries but for script-only storage of handlers/script snippets that could be click-to-add to the current script editor window OR drag+dropped onto 'the target' object to replace the objects script entirely (after a confirmation dialog of course).

I was looking for handlers that I wrote some years ago that did hexToDec decToHex in a way that respects the various ways hex numbers as strings/literals can be denoted (#FF7FF7 versus 0xFF7FF7 for example), and could not find them in my vast folder(s) of collected stacks and quick experiments. Likewise, I don't know how many times I've re-written handlers to get the leaf-name or parent-folder-name from a file path. I should have these handlers readily available to insert into my scripts.
This ScriptEditor context menu addition could bring up this 'Snippets' palette too (there was a stack revSnippets palette in some version of LC CE that ould be used as a basis for this), and SE context menu item could also quickly add the text selected in the SE window as a new script-sniplet, stored by user assigned name in a user's scripts cache.

I'd also want want this snippet/script-scrapbook palette to additionally read / list any 'defaultScripts' for the target object type & kind (if its type is "widget"). The default scripts are those inactive handlers in the handler list on the left side of script editor windows, those are click-to-insert-prewritten-script already (they live in a resource folder in the IDE or for Widget's its 'support' directory). The 'vanilla' ones in the IDE for 'classic controls' are very basic, handlers were just 'on whatEver' and 'end whatEver' but I've since modified and added a few, and also many of the widget extensions I've written include their own custom _defaultScripts.

I want to Make xTalk Hyper Again!! Both in the HyperMedia (interactive multimedia) sense and the rapid in R.A.D. (Rapid Application Development), live-coding instant gratification sense.

Here's a great one liner scriptsniplet:
Insert it into repeat loop to enable command + "." to exit script.

AND, SO:

"Dear Malkom,
You probably do not remember me, but we corresponded a few years ago.
I am excited to see that you have produced a new version for Windows.
Is there any chance that a 64-bit Macintosh version might be in the pipeline?
sincerely Richmond Mathewson."
-----
"Hi Richmond,
Really nice to hear from you and I hope all is well in Bulgaria.
Its great to see you are still active in LiveCode forums as I'm a frequent silent visitor although its been over a decade since I last tried RunRev - a wonderful system.
About Macintosh x64 - its looking good for a release this year although I try never to promise anything.
The new multi-platform Save/Load is tested and work is progressing for working on Mac. Been stripping out incompatible code and now down from 680 compile errors to 286 but most of these last ones should be easy to fix. Of course run-time errors are where the fun is.
Still need to get an M1 Mac with user switchable SSD so can develop different version of MacOS - its been Yosemite since HyperNext last worked on a Mac
All the best, Malcolm"
-----
"Dear Malcolm,
Glad to see that you have reverted to spelling your name is a more standard sort of way.
Far more than LiveCode, I am now involved with OpenXTalk, which has been "hived-off" from the last few Open Source versions of LiveCode after the parent company dumped it and put up the price of their commercial version to something well out of reach of educators like myself.

https://openxtalk.org/

Best, Richmond."

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 4:03 pm I'm now thinking a lot about 'stack ideas'...but maybe more of a scripting snippets,Scripter's Scrapbook sort of way, like the image libraries or the objects libraries but for script-only storage of handlers/script snippets that could be click-to-add to the current script editor window OR drag+dropped onto 'the target' object...

Do you mean like this?

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 4:03 pm ...I should have these handlers readily available to insert into my scripts.

If you like the idea of that kind of thing in OXT Lite, I could really expand upon these - I could have an icon in the tools palette where you add all kinds of preset scripts from a popup menu.

Somewhere along the way the stack as in stack-of-hyperlinked-cards metaphor seems to have been lost sight of. I believe that metaphor is still relevant and needs to be revived.

tperry2x wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2024 10:45 pm

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 4:03 pm I'm now thinking a lot about 'stack ideas'...but maybe more of a scripting snippets,Scripter's Scrapbook sort of way, like the image libraries or the objects libraries but for script-only storage of handlers/script snippets that could be click-to-add to the current script editor window OR drag+dropped onto 'the target' object...

Do you mean like this?

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 4:03 pm ...I should have these handlers readily available to insert into my scripts.

If you like the idea of that kind of thing in OXT Lite, I could really expand upon these - I could have an icon in the tools palette where you add all kinds of preset scripts from a popup menu.

No I didn't mean quite like that, I meant more like a separate scrapbook in a palette or menuStack, and a way to invoke it from the Script Editor windows, via context menu or button, then either select some snippets to insert or add the selectedText (script) to the snippet list. Having the snippets stored as data somewhere though, we could then re-use that list in various alternative ways I suppose.

I do think your idea of having default scripts auto-applied to new objects is a really good idea, could be very helpful for users new and old alike. Personally, I often use that list in the pane on the left side of SE windows (with modified source-data) to insert pre-written handlers, depending on what I'm trying to do (for example I might want a button to respond to mouseDown, mouseStiillDown but not mouseUp). It's a particularly good mechanism for working with Widgets extensions since those controls might generate custom event messages. Having a default 'demo' script that enables a common use-case for a control already applied to it makes sense too. That's sort of what I had in mind when I suggested ._defaultScripts before that were added to the Extension Builder spec (I should go back and read that thread, it was probably around 8+ years ago)

Would it be possible to separate the threads in this discussion into 1 about HyperNext, and the other one about OXT Next?

richmond62 wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2024 6:03 pm Would it be possible to separate the threads in this discussion into 1 about HyperNext, and the other one about OXT Next?

Yeah sorry, it's not fair to his work to mix up this HyperNext 'Announce' thread with OpenXTalk concerns.

My mind wanders off into different directions, particularly after reading your thread from back when which discussed some of the finer-point differences between various xTalk/xCard implimentations. Like for instance the concept of SuperCard's 'SuperEdit" as a seperate app just for editing the SC IDE (?) has me thinking that I just never got 'it' in regards to SuperCard IDE but maybe I should've tried harder.