Most of these stories were basically linear in nature which is why I said that they did not really have all that much to do with the concept of hypertext. This wish was spoken out loud (placed in a speech balloon) but the mouse's thought (placed in a thought balloon) was "I am not as stupid as I look." The next speech balloon revealed that the mouse had chosen to sing the well-known song about bottles on a wall (falling down one at a time), but starting with "A thousand million green bottles sitting on a wall." So this smart mouse would survive for some time to come. For example, in a story about a mouse about to be killed, it asked for a last wish: To sing a song. It is even possible to contrast what the characters say with what they think. In this way, it is possible for the child to generate a dialogue between the characters in the story. The interesting idea is that it is possible to add multiple bubbles to each card whereupon they will be displayed to the reader one at a time. More advanced designs used a facility called bubbles where the children can first draw their cards and then choose from various shapes of comics-like speech and thought-balloons to add to the image. Of course, most of these stories were fairly simple, such as (created by a 7-years old) "the teddy bear went for a walk in the forest and met another teddy bear"-shown over a sequential series of HyperCard cards like a cartoon strip. One of the more interesting examples of the use of HyperCard was shown by Harry McMahon and Bill O'Neill from the University of Ulster who had placed a few Macintoshes with sound and image digitizers in an elementary school to get the pupils to create their own interactive fiction. In spite of the heavy presence of Apple systems at the conference there were no speakers or demoers from Apple who had preferred to concentrate on some commercial event taking place in Glasgow. In any case, many of the uses of HyperCard demoed at this conference had nothing to do with hypertext as it is traditionally understood but were simply prototypes of general graphical user interfaces. This conference did not have very much work in evidence done at actual companies using HyperCard, however, even though I personally promote it also for prototyping "real" user interfaces in a paper presented to a broad audience at the NordDATA'89 Joint Scandinavian Computer Conference. It was amazing to see the explosion of activity generated by HyperCard at various universities and research centers. The hypertext also uses an inconsistent notation for the anchors for Guide expansion and reference buttons. In general, only very few of the figures from the book are also in the hypertext. Even worse is of course the fact that the figure has not been included in the hypertext version. Since Guide uses scrolling text fields, there is no such thing as a next page, and furthermore any decent hypertext would provide a link for the user to click on here. "-a piece of text which was obviously taken unchanged from the printed version of the chapter. Unfortunately this hypertext version was quite poorly done, as can be seen from a few examples: The very first chapter contains the following words: "Figure 1, on the next page. So since the proceedings of Hypertext I had seen only limited distribution, the organizers had taken the somewhat unusual step of including them in the material for Hypertext 2 (The Hypertext I proceedings are also published as Hypertext Theory Into Practice by Ablex).įurthermore, the registration packet included a hypertext version of the Hypertext I papers in Guide form. The first was (surprise) Hypertext I which was held last year for an audience of only 35 people. Most of the participants came from the U.K., but there was also a fair number of participants from many other European countries as well as from USA/Canada and Asia (Japan and Singapore, of course).Īs can be seen from the name, Hypertext 2 was the second U.K hypertext conference. might attract 100 participants, but that was the underestimate of the year. Their original assumption was that a hypertext conference in the U.K. Actually it had "attracted" many more who were just not there but had been turned away because the organizers had committed the same mistake as the planners of the Hypertext'87 conference in North Carolina and placed the conference in a location which would only hold 200 people. Hypertext 2 was the major conference in Europe this year in the hypertext field and attracted 200 participants. The conference proceedings can be bought online.
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