Ben's HyperCard Page

I made a good living in the past with Apple's now obsolete HyperCard development tool. You can read about it at HyperActive Software's HyperCard Success Stories page. I would turn to HyperCard when I had an unusual task to accomplish, or for the intellectual pleasure of solving a problem. Nothing has really captured my imagination the same way since then.

These pages contain a collection of stacks and externals I've created, for your use and possibly education.

The material contained here is offered AS IS. I make NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, express or implied, nor does any other contributor to this site. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. Your actual damages are limited in any event to the price charged for this material.

I welcome/encourage your feedback on these stacks. Most of are utilities aimed at HyperCard programming and have been written with an eye to good style, compactness and efficiency. If you feel that I've spotted an oversight on my part, please tell me!

HyperTalk Snippets. Updated 1998-12-29

A collection of HyperTalk examples.

ArrayMaster 1.0b1. Copyright Ben Lawson 1996-98. 13K StuffIt archive, Freeware. Updated 1996-03-24.

ArrayMaster is a stack that demonstrates how to implement two-dimensional arrays in pure HyperTalk. Several (five) custom functions that use the "itemdelimiter" property cleverly are all you need.

BreakName

An XFCN that quickly separates the parts of a file pathname (i.e volume, parent directory, path to the file, or just the actual file name itself).

ChangeCase XFCN 1.2. Copyright Ben Lawson, 1993-96. 10K StuffIt archive. Free for personal use. Updated 1998-05-20.

The ChangeCase XFCN contained in this HyperCard stack takes text input and quickly (1000 times faster than pure HyperTalk) returns that text with the case of its characters changed to one of: flip (reversed), lowercase, random, sentence, title, uppercase.

CrushEm

A utility HyperTalk handler that automatically compacts HyperCard stacks if their free space exceeds a specified threshold. A big script, but very robust...

MacWorld Toronto, 1994. Copyright Ben Lawson, 1994. 220K StuffIt archive. Freeware. Updated 1998-05-20.

Genvieve Crabe and I gave a presentation called "Advanced HyperCard" at the 1994 Toronto MacWorld conference. The session was an introduction to HyperCard's scripting features. These are my presentation notes, in a HyperCard stack, natch.

MultiColumn

A stack demonstrating how to scroll several fields in synch with each other.

Pretty Lousy Privacy XFCN 1.0. Copyright Ben Lawson, 1993. 8K StuffIt archive. Freeware.

This was more of an exercise in learning to use CompileIt than anything else. Pretty Lousy Privacy is exactly that: a painfully simple and easy to crack "encryption". Best used to annoy people rather than actually conceal your seditious schemes.

SlideObjects

A stack demonstrating how to use a button or field as a sliding control element.