Arabic-L:GEN:Hypercard, Nisus and other OS X queries

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 24 Sep 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Hypercard, Nisus and other OS X queries
2) Subject:Partial response

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1)
Date: 24 Sep 2002
From: Waheed A Samy <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Hypercard, Nisus and other OS X queries

With the advent of OS X, and the subsequent upgrade of institution
machines to that version, many problems are liable to surface.  For
example, it is my understanding that Apple is withdrawing support for
Hypercard(?), and Nisus might not function.  Is this true, and are there
other applications that will not work?
What potential problems lie ahead, and what recommended fixes or
strategies are available?

Waheed

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2)
Date: 24 Sep 2002
From:Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject:Partial resonse to #1

Apple is no longer developing or supporting Hypercard.  Since it is a
'legacy' program, it will currently run only under Classic, and as you
upgrade more and more of your programs to OS X, running things under
Classic becomes more and more annoying.
Nisus claims that it is coming up with an OS X version, so there is
more hope there.
Quark currently also does not have an OS X version, so the Arabic XT
extensions also run only under Classic.  They claim they will
eventually upgrade to OS X, but by that time everyone may have switched
to InDesign.
Revolution is a kind of Hypercard Clone that does run under OS X, and
which they claim will have Unicode support.  People like it a lot for
porting old Hypercard stacks to, and it is cross platform (you can
develop on Mac or PC, and run on Mac or PC if you follow certain
restrictions), but I have not yet been successful in getting it to
display Arabic adequately.
The major problem that I currently see is that although OS X has
unicode support, you still need applications that are programmed to
support Arabic input and right to left display, and contextual
character shaping.  There is no evidence that anyone is 'rushing' to
provide these applications.  I assume we'll eventually have something
decent, but nothing is really decent yet.  You can get Arabic text in
TextEdit for example, but decent is not an appropriate word to describe
the results.
Other responses to Wahid's query are, of course, welcome.
Dil

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End of Arabic-L:  24 Sep 2002