First an aside for those not familiar with what Net browsers and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) do.
When you go out on the Web and look at a Web page, what you see may
not be what the Web page's author intended. Unlike a TV signal that's broadcast to your set, what you download to your computer isn't a picture but a set of instructions on how to create a picture. Your Web-browser software runs those instructions as a program, and you see the result. What you see depends in great part on what hardware you have; if you have a slow system with primitive graphics, you'll get an entirely different picture from what you'd see with high-end equipment.
When you post stuff onto the Net, what you're really doing is writing a program to be run on your reader's computer. When I download an HTML file, I get text, formatting instructions, and graphics, all of which are interpreted by my Web browser. What I see will be from slightly to quite different if I look at it with Netscape Navigator or the Microsoft Explorer.
Java and the Microsoft equivalent carry this further by giving my computer much more complex graphics, including animations. The difference in what I see if I
view the same page with the two browsers will be much greater than with plain HTML documents.
Java and its follow-ons are based on C++. If you want to be a Web master, you'll have to study C and its derivatives. Microsoft, on the other hand, is building their Web packages around OLE -- and you can create OLE objects in Visual Basic. When Visual Basic 5 comes out later this year, it will have extensive capabilities for creating objects to use with Microsoft's Net-viewing programs.
Given the frantic growth of the Internet and its insatiable demand for ever-newer stuff, it's pretty clear that knowing a Web-page creation language will be an extremely salable skill -- and it's a heck of a lot easier to learn Visual Basic than C++.
I won't say that learning Visual Basic is simple.
It will take some time -- weeks to months, in my estimation -- but it's not all that difficult if you stick with it. There are dozens of books and tutorials. My preference so far is to get Visual
Basic and the book
Visual Basic by Example, New Edition
by Russell Jacobs, et al (Que, 1995) and have at it. You write running programs from the first lesson. There are 35 chapters, and if you get through them all at, say, three a week, you'll know quite a lot before you're done. Be warned: I've always liked the hands-dirty method of learning from examples.
The alternative is systematic study of programming. If you work at it, that probably won't take much longer and you'll know more when you're finished; the problem is to sustain interest during the beginning phases.
Either way works, though, and is well worth the effort, both for fun and as a job skill. There will come a time when elementary programming skills will be as vital to a career as the ability to make notes and write letters; and it never hurts to be ahead of the game.
Meanwhile, on the Mac side, Allegiant Technologies also has Marionet, a way to construct Web pages from SuperCard, HyperCard, Director, FileMaker, and the othe
r Mac tools you use. If you use SuperCard, you really ought to get Marionet; it's no harder to learn and adds another potent capability to what you can do with SuperCard. Recommended.
I don't write movie or TV scripts, so I'm not the best judge
of scripting tools, but I can say that ScriptThing for DOS is good enough. Norman Spinrad once told me the hardest part of writing a script was getting the margins right. This does far more than that. It keeps track of character names and presents them in a menu when you need them. It knows about page breaks, MOREs, scene numbers, transitions, and all the arcana of professional scripting.
I heard about ScriptThing from friends in the business who switched over to it from much more expensive software, so I asked for a review copy. The installation is writer-friendly, clearly intended for people a bit afraid of computers. As an example, when it asks for your name and the software serial number, it tells you, "The serial number can be found on the
cover of the manual. Your name is on your driver's license." The rest of the installation is at that level.
It took no more than 10 minutes to get this up and running, and another 20 minutes or so to get the hang of what it's doing. Working with ScriptThing is a lesson in the mechanics of script formatting; I know people who paid more than ScriptThing costs just to take a class on that.
If you're a professional scriptwriter, you should know about ScriptThing. If, like many readers, you think that one day you might try breaking into that racket, you're bucking heavy odds to start with: using ScriptThing for DOS can shave those a little. Recommended.
Virtual Entertainment produces Personality Test.
The box claims that the Original Cambridge Personality Test is one of the most unique, fascinating, and revealing tests ever published. It doesn't say that the Original Cambridge Personality Test is what's in the box, but I suppose that's what it is.
Mostly, it's a vari
ant of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a rather stressful instrument designed to identify people who have real problems; it's about as subtle as a brickbat. The MMPI has never been any fun, and I wouldn't think the Original Cambridge is a great deal more so. I found this more interesting as an illustration of what kind of CD-ROM you can produce with Macromedia and QuickTime than as a personality test. If you really want a personality test, you can get that and an IQ test free at a number of street-corner shops....
Amiga fans will remember Scala, one of the neatest multimedia
production tools for that machine. The Amiga was a wonderful system way ahead of its time. Alas, it was done in by bad marketing and inconsistent management; I hope Apple learns from that lesson.
Scala Multimedia is a general-purpose authoring system. The CD-ROM version we have claims to work with DOS, OS/2, Windows, Win 95, and NT. What I have is a final beta copy, and I can't say I
've done much with it; but I really loved the Amiga version, and the programmers tell me they went to great lengths to make this work just the way it did with the Amiga.
Scala for the Amiga let you build a storyboard rather quickly. You could build text presentations and add video effects. It was fun to use; how much of that was the Amiga I don't know. More on Scala Multimedia when it's final, but Amiga fans will be glad to hear that Scala is back.
The cover letter says "and now for something completely different," and Geodyssey's Hipparchus is certainly that.
Hipparchus is a set of programming tools that lets you deal with objects having size and location. Since the tools are intended to work with C++ programs, it's vanishingly unlikely that I'll ever do anything with this, but the demonstration is impressive. Using these tools, you can model any planet of any (more or less ellipsoid) shape and then use it to find distances and spatial relationships between objects on or near the surface. Want to
know just how far you'd go if you travel from the top of Everest to the floor of Death Valley? You could get an accurate figure from Hipparchus.
The Hipparchus data repository can hold immense quantities of information; the programmers suggest it may be useful to hold surveys of Mars or the Moon. You can also shift coordinate references to model the Sun and Moon as satellies of the Earth, or the Earth and Moon as satellites of the Sun; and then measure distances between points on their surfaces.
It's not something I can use, but if you're into geology, geography, or otherwise interested in the where of things, you probably ought to know about Hipparchus.
Product Information
Hipparchus Release 3 SDK............$775 for DOS, Win32/Win95/WinNT, OS/2
...................................$1475 for Mac, most Unix platforms
Geodyssey, Ltd.
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Phone: (403) 234-9848
Fax: (403) 266-7117
Internet:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca:8001/~russellj/
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Of Java, Visual Basic, and Writing for TV
