MetaCard
MetaCard was the language of the month in november 1997.
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About the language
 MetaCard is not really a language but rather a development
environment. It is very similar to the well known Apple's HyperCard or Allegiant's SuperCard
available on Macintosh. MetaCard uses an interpreted language called
MetaTalk. Using MetaCard, you build up stacks made of
cards. Each card will contains GUI elements like text fields, buttons
or scroll bars. The user can navigate from one card to an other using links.
Actually, MetaCard is available for several operating systems including
Windows 95/NT, Windows 3.1, Linux, Solaris, Digital UNIX, Irix, HP UNIX and
AIX. MetaCard is best suited to build multi-platform business, eduction or
multimedia applications.
What I think of the language
 I think the HyperCard model is very
interesting, or at least was very interesting. Let me explain what I
mean. What does HyperCard (or SuperCard, or MetaCard) provide? You get
stacks of cards. Each card is shown as page containing text but also bitmaps
or other GUI elements. All those elements can act as links to other cards.
You can also add some code in HyperTalk (or SuperTalk, or MetaTalk) to
implement a particular behaviour for any element. This is wonderfull but it
does just remind me the Web model. Replace in the above paragraph
cards with HTML pages and HyperTalk with
JavaScript and you will get a description of the Web model. Actualy
you can use technologies based on open standards like HTML and JavaScript to
achieve the same thing you did some year ago with HyperCard. So, I think
development environments based on the HyperCard model won't have a great
success in the futur since you can do the same job using widely used open
standards.
Projets involving MetaCard
 MetaCard can be use to build
multimedia presentation or small applications. You can get several exemples
of such applications downloading the MetaCard Starter Kit from MetaCard Web site. On the same site, you
will find several exemples of applications built with
MetaCard. The Linux Journal
published in its nevember 1997 issue an article about an X version of the
top program built with MetaCard. A with paper about this
application is also available.
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