Why do you use HyperCard instead of its competitors, such as SuperCard?
I've tried other authoring programs, and I use some of them when they are
appropriate, but I have found very few instances where HyperCard couldn't
do the job. Most of my professional work centers around tools and solutions.
I think HyperCard is much better suited to that type of program. SuperCard
is more geared toward multimedia.
For example, SuperCard can't print for beans;
if you need a program that does any type of printing beyond simple card
printouts, you need to look elsewhere. I find SuperCard's debugger to be
very awkward and limited, and its dual programming environment is cumbersome.
SuperCard also doesn't support marked cards and shared text.
SuperCard is a very nice program, but for
ease of use I still prefer HyperCard. HyperCard was my first love, and
I haven't changed my mind about it yet. I know it in an intimate, familiar
fashion. I'm comfortable with it, I can work quickly with it, and I do
almost everything with it.
For example...?
I run HyperCard all the time in the background, and perform most tasks
from within HyperCard. When some of those Finder launcher utilities came
out, I was underwhelmed since I had been launching everything from my Home
stack for years, including groups of related files, which NOW Utilities
brags so much about. I didn't like launching behemouth MS Word to read
a text file, so I wrote a HyperCard word processor in which I do almost
all my online work -- it manages more than 32K of text, saves files, appends
or concatenates files, makes BBS-style quotes, strips prefixes, everything
Vantage used to do. Since I always have HyperCard running, it is faster
to move to that stack than to launch even SimpleText, and it does a whole
lot more.
The greatest thing is that if I need it to
perform a task it doesn't do yet, I just write that task in. I have a lot
of personalized tools like that; tools that are specific to exactly my
needs and working habits, tools that you can't buy anywhere. I know of
no other program which is as customizable for the way I work.
I wouldn't give it up for the world. That's
not to say that HyperCard doesn't have shortcomings that need to be addressed.
What improvements would you like to see?
Everyone knows HyperCard needs integrated color, cross-platform capability,
and scriptable draw graphics. That makes it sound a lot like SuperCard,
I know, and SuperCard is a very nice program I also use professionally,
but I still prefer HyperCard.
How did you become a forum staff member at America Online?
I was brought on as staff in the HyperCard forum on the recommendation
of Don Fitzwater (AFA Don F), who had known me for years from our association
on his local BBS here in Minneapolis.
What does a staff member do?
There isn't really any secret to being a staff member on AOL. Basically
you just work real hard all the time for no money. There are some side
benefits, in that you meet a lot of great people and a lot of people know
who you are, though that doesn't help business much since we are not allowed
to advertise ourselves or our companies while we are in staff uniform.
So staff members don't get paid?
Most people don't realize that except for a very few people in higher places,
AOL staff are volunteers. I think AOL should make that better known. Most
people think there is a cadre of paid staff who do nothing but manage the
forums full-time; they don't realize that we all have full-time jobs elsewhere
and we work all those extra hours just because we believe in what we are
doing and we want to help people. It hurts me when I see some of the bad-mouthing
about AOL that some people do. I'd like to see those people provide the
services we do without a cent in return and often without even any recognition.
My mother still doesn't understand what I
do on AOL. I have tried to explain it many times, but she keeps asking
me if I am getting paid yet. To her, it isn't a job unless you get paid.
The fact that I enjoy the work and the people I meet doesn't matter to
her. Neither of my parents understand online communications and they cannot
fathom why anyone would need a modem. "I can get everything I need
on the telephone or at the library," they say. They just don't get
it.
For me, AOL and the internet in general are
a real addiction. If my modem breaks, I go through withdrawal and my brain
shrivels up. I start typing on the countertops.
What are your duties in the forum?
Every forum on AOL has different rules, and each determines the breakdown
of responsibilities for their staff. In the HyperCard forum I am in charge
of the message boards and I'm also doing most of the work involved in putting
up our new content and forum design. Doing the message boards means reading
the messages several times a day, removing offensive or inappropriate postings,
warning people not to post in multiple folders, and every month or two,
archiving any interesting old message threads to disk before deleting the
backlog.
Message boards have an upper limit and old
stuff has to be removed to make room for new. I've been keeping archives
of interesting content for almost two years now. With our new forum capabilities,
I have finally been able to post those old messages online for others to
browse. We have requested a search database for them too; when AOL gets
that going, members will be able to search the archives for answers to
specific questions. That is something we've been waiting for a very long
time. It's the next best thing to searchable message boards, which AOL
doesn't offer.
Before we brought on some other staff, I was
also doing most of the library file checks.
Is it fun to check out all the new uploads?
When you see a terrific, professional-quality file uploaded, it is a tremendous
uplift. There is some excellent work in the AOL HyperCard libraries, gems
that few people know about. But too often, file checking is a tedious,
thankless, and unrewarding job. Nobody likes file checking, and anyone
who tells you they do is probably lying in order to get something out of
you.
That's why we get so excited when we see a
well-executed stack. It's the "Kill Barney" and "The Best
Game Ever!!!!!!!" and "Man gets beheaded by a ceiling fan"
stacks that wear you out.
Why do uploads need to be examined?
We have to check them for language (no bad words on AOL, ever, anywhere)
and ensure that they at least run without errors.
Can you reject lousy stacks?
We cannot reject stacks that are awful just because they make you want
to hold your nose; there has to be a legitimate reason. I guess I agree
with this in principle, but in reality I'd like to apply some censorship.
I think my attitude is a direct result of actually having had to look at
some of these stacks; I was a lot more liberal before I had to see them.
The people who don't want censorship are the folks who have never been
forced to download and peruse "Two cows puking on a dog."
What's the funniest thing that's happened to you as a forum staffer?
Here is the best AOL story I know, one that proves that AOL has not yet
solved the problems of big bureacracy. Remember, no files may be released
to public libraries on AOL if they contain any language considered to violate
the Terms of Service. In order to help speed up file checks, I wrote a
comprehensive HyperCard utility that stores a dictionary of bad words and
then automatically scans for language violations in all the files I had
to download.
It was incredible freedom. I no longer had
to read every single word of every single script, resource, and text file.
I could point this baby at a folder and go to bed. In the morning, fifteen
megs of files were checked for language and logged; I had a full report
of any violations in each file.
The other staff liked it too, and it became
the forum utility tool for file checking. I gave it to the staff in the
DTP forum and they liked it too, since it reads any file, not just stacks.
Everyone was using this great tool, and I had saved staff a lot of work.
So, I reasoned, probably staff all over AOL would like it. There's a staff
area where we can post files for each other and I uploaded it there and
waited for it to be released.
Some time later, I received a rejection notice,
saying that AOL could not release my language-checking utility because
it violated the Terms of Service. My file had bad words in it.
I'd like to leave the story there, because
it sounds good to end it that way. But to be fair to AOL, they followed
up and said that the there had been a mistake; the file was not rejected
for the language it contained, but rather because staff might assume that
the list it held was the "official" AOL list, and AOL does not
have a certified, sponsored list of naughty words. That's true; every forum
decides which words are acceptable and which aren't. AOL suggested I upload
a version with a blank dictionary so that each forum could add their own
words. I did that, and the utility was released and has since had enough
downloads to lead me to believe that a lot of staff all over AOL are using
it.
I sent the story to Scott Adams. Who knows,
maybe it will show up in Dilbert some day.
E-mail Jacque (afajacque@aol.com)
E-mail HyperCard Heaven (hcheaven@aol.com) with your comments about this interview and they might get printed on our "--Comments" page.