Articles by Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins is a licensed architect who produces all of his work on Macs (yes, even when all he had to work with was a Mac Plus, floppy disks and a wide carriage dot-matrix printer). He has produced his own “Picture” fonts, programmed 5 commercial applications, and chalked up more than twenty-two years of Mac experience - starting with the Lisa. He also authored the “University of HyperCard” on the original Macinstruct website.
Software Piracy: Black Beard & Captain Kidd!
March 7, 2007
In keeping with a recent article about piracy in the Runtime Revolution Newsletter, I’ve chosen to reprint an article I wrote in 2000 for the original Macinstruct website. It is still quite relevant and on target. Last week’s Code Mojo article presented me with significant issues - more than I had originally thought - but I will be back next week reviewing some of the scripting that was done in the Coloring Book application.
Rolling a Revolution Application
February 27, 2007
We left off last week with having pretty much completed a completely new Revolution stack, named the “San Diego Activities and Coloring Book.” There were still a number of issues and more than a few scripting challenges to be resolved. I had assumed, somewhat naively, that the balance of the scripts would not be a great deal different than their HyperCard counterparts. As I dug in to completing them, I found that was not exactly to be the case.
Creating a New Cross-Platform Application in Revolution
February 21, 2007
When I first started thinking about this Chapter, I lost focus and started thinking about knowing all there is to know about Revolution. That was naive, and pretty stupid of me. I had exposed myself to a little bit of the vastness of Revolution and started thinking in grander terms than my original conception, which was to provide the old HyperCard crowd a really good excuse to shift their long-standing HC devotion to Revolution by demonstrating that Revolution can be a fairly simple extension to their HyperCard addiction.
Converting HyperCard Stacks to Standalone Apps Using Revolution
February 14, 2007
First of all, I want to say that my recent voyages into the land of Revolution have started taking their toll on me. Something that I, simplistically, had thought I was “up to” as a challenge in teaching has started to become far more. I’m not giving up; I just need to set the record straight: I’m a beginner, just like many of you who are reading my offerings, and my tenet “the best way to learn is by teaching” still remains in place.
Convert a HyperCard Stack to Revolution
February 6, 2007
I had every intention of responding to readers’ comments about my last column on Revolution, and I’m going to do just that; but we’re also going to start with some serious Revolution activity after I make a few corrections to my previous offerings. Thanks to several of the RevList members, it was brought to my attention that I made a couple of erroneous observations and remarks. Should you go back to reread my previous articles, you will notice that I will have changed them a little to reflect the things that I am about to reveal - though not immediately!
What Can Be Done Using Revolution?
January 30, 2007
Since this column is going to be an evaluation and, hopefully, a guide to using Revolution to assist you in solving your problems, the very first thing we need to do is cover some of the most important general programming tenets. When an idea for resolving a problem or issue that we encounter in everyday life occurs to us, our first hurdle is to come up with a method of “doing it” with our computer.
Why Would Ordinary People Want to Program?
January 23, 2007
Last week’s article was supposed to have been labeled a “Prelude”; hence this one is the real introduction, but first a short note about the responses I received from the first article. The responses were not numerous, although the ones I did receive were very enlightening and probably represent a cross section of the nearly 1,800 readers who did take the time on the first day it was posted to look at what I had to say about Revolution and what is planned down the road.
Introducing Revolution: The New HyperCard
January 16, 2007
First a little nostalgia. Back several years ago, prior to the emergence of OS X, there was a widely used, widely popular and widely supported Apple program called HyperCard. It made its appearance in the late ’80s and I was one of its biggest advocates. For several years, though a licensed architect, I made my living creating HyperCard stacks of a highly sophisticated nature. This was in the era of the Mac SE30 with its dinky little black and white 9-inch screen, and a 16 MHz processor without a built-in hard drive.