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We're at Macworld Expo 2009 in San Francisco with the latest news about the show. Check back often this week for updates!
- Phil Schiller Delivers Lackluster Keynote
- iPhoto '09 Adds Faces and Places
- iMovie '09 Seems to Fix Everything from iMovie '08
- GarageBand '09 Adds Music Lessons
- iWork Turns '09
- Apple Moves to Unprotected Music, Tiered Prices
- Apple Pioneers New Battery Tech with 17-inch MacBook Pro
- Jobs Clears the Air on Health Issue
- Welcome to Macintosh Movie to Screen at Macworld Expo
- MacHEADS Movie to Premiere at Macworld Expo
- TidBITS Events at Macworld SF 2009
Mysteriously Moving Margins in Word
In Microsoft Word 2008 (and older versions), if you put your cursor in a paragraph and then move a tab or indent marker in the ruler, the change applies to just that paragraph. If your markers are closely spaced, you may have trouble grabbing the right one, and inadvertently work with tabs when you want to work with indents, or vice-versa. The solution is to hover your mouse over the marker until a yellow tooltip confirms which element you're about to drag.
I recently came to appreciate the importance of waiting for those tooltips: a document mysteriously reset its margins several times while I was under deadline pressure, causing a variety of problems. After several hours of puzzlement, I had my "doh!" moment: I had been dragging a margin marker when I thought I was dragging an indent marker.
When it comes to moving markers in the Word ruler, the moral of the story is always to hover, read, and only then drag.
Written by Tonya Engst
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| The ToolBook Toolbox
Despite numerous criticisms, HyperCard has been extremely popular among Macintosh users because of its ease of use and flexibility. Clones were inevitable, and Silicon Beach introduced SuperCard and Olduvai introduced PLUS (now marketed by Spinnaker) to complement HyperCard. Both are slower than HyperCard but provide powerful features that HyperCard lacked. Neither has gained the acceptance HyperCard has, though, because both are commercial products that cannot compete with the price of the free HyperCard.
HyperCard-like products sprang up on the PC as well, with HyperPad being the most visible along with LinkWay from IBM. None could read HyperCard stacks, though, until Spinnaker announced a version of PLUS for Windows and Presentation Manager that could read PLUS stacks from the Mac, and thus HyperCard stacks through the Macintosh version of PLUS. LinkWay has been criticized as clumsy, and HyperPad has no graphical capabilities, being limited to the ASCII character set of the PC.
Now however, a recently-released program may provide some of HyperCard's power for PC users. Asymetrix Corp., founded by Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, announced its first product, the $395 ToolBook. ToolBook is designed to work with Windows 3.0 and runtime versions of ToolBook will accompany all copies of Windows 3.0. In addition, all 386 machines from Zenith will come with Windows 3.0 and the complete version of ToolBook installed. Hopefully they will also include at least 1.5 MB of RAM, because ToolBook needs that much minimum.
ToolBook uses a "book" and "page" metaphor instead of HyperCard's "stack" and "card" metaphor, although we at TidBITS think that if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck, no matter what the ostensible metaphor. Like HyperCard 2.0 and System 7.0, ToolBook will exchange information with Windows applications through Dynamic Data Exchange, and also like HyperCard and its XCMDs and XFCNs, ToolBook will be extensible through what it calls Dynamic Link Libraries. One advantage ToolBook will have over HyperCard is a Script Recorder that will build scripts from watching the actions made by the user. Scripts can also be attached to anything such as graphics or bits of text, not just buttons or fields. ToolBook books can be distributed with a royalty-free runtime version, although in theory everyone with Windows 3.0 should already have that runtime version.
The icing on the ToolBook cake is a program called ConvertIt!, written by The HyperMedia Group for Heizer Software. ConvertIt!, true to its name, will convert HyperCard stacks into ToolBook books. ConvertIt! will be released this summer and we then see how complete its conversion actually is. Who knows, we may even convert the TidBITS reader to ToolBook, although we would do so from the ground up to take advantage of ToolBook's capabilities and avoid its weaknesses.
Asymetrix -- 206/462-0501
Heizer Software -- 415/943-7667 -- 800/888-7667
Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 22-May-90, Vol. 4 #20, pg. 9
InfoWorld -- 21-May-90, Vol. 12 #21, pg. 1, 101
PC WEEK -- 22-May-90, Vol. 7 #20, pg. 6, Supplement pg. 38
PC WEEK -- 11-Jun-90, Vol. 7 #23, pg. 51
InfoWorld -- 11-Jun-90, Vol. 12 #24, pg. 1
InfoWorld -- 02-Jul-90, Vol. 12 #27, pg. 82
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