What did you do at Heizer?
My job in those early days was to do pretty much everything related to
the Stack Exchange -- develop stacks, review submissions (and reject most),
work out the contracts with the authors, write the catalog copy, write
press releases, plan marketing efforts, do the tech support, take orders,
work the booth at trade shows, etc. Ray Heizer did the same for the Excel
side of the business.
Later, Doug Reed joined Heizer as an assistant
to Ray so Ray could focus more on being the President of the company. And,
sometime after that, Alan Pabst joined us as my assistant so that I could
focus more on big picture issues and new business opportunities.
What's it like to work at a trade show?
I always liked working the booth at trade shows, especially MacWorld. I'm
kinda into accessibility. I like to hear from my customers and feel it's
an important part of product development/management. So doing the shows
means I get to put faces with names (or email addresses as the case may
be these days) and have more extended conversations with customers/associates
than would normally be possible over the phone or via email. Opportunities
of all types seem to come in droves at trade shows as well.
Eventually, the business grew to a peak of
about 14 people counting most of the Heizer family. During that time the
Stack Exchange became the HyperMedia Exchange and included products for
both Asymetrix ToolBook on the Windows side of the world and for SuperCard
in addition to HyperCard. The HyperMedia Exchange accounted for over half
of Heizer Software's sales at this point (close to two million a year in
total sales).
When HyperCard was no longer free, did that affect business?
When Claris took over HyperCard and started charging real money for it,
the whole market changed. Lots of little HyperCard businesses disappeared
-- seemingly overnight. We were lucky. About a year earlier I had started
to focus us on developer tools -- products like CompileIt! and Dialoger
Professional (which became WindowScript and later spun out FaceSpan). When
Claris took over, we put more effort into the more serious tools we had
and positioned them in the Heizer Select Series. I gradually started weeding
out more and more of the non-developer tool stacks and I focused on identifying
good XCMD authors and the like. We survived although it was tough going
for a while.
In 1994, the Heizer Software product line,
the "Excellent Exchange" of Microsoft Excel products, was sold
to Baarns Publishing and the Heizer Tax Series (a very popular selection
of Excel-based tax templates) was sold to ATX Forms. At this point, Heizer
was purely focused on HyperCard, and to a lesser degree, on SuperCard.
When I left Heizer in 1995, we were focused
solely on Developer Tools. The old catalog was gone and was replaced by
the "Heizer Developer News Newsletter"
(which was quite popular -- back issues can be found at their their web
site and Heizer is currently resurrecting Developer News with new issues
expected before the end of the year!). I left after almost eight years
running the Hypermedia Products group at Heizer. It was one of the most
satisfying experiences I've had in my life.
Why did you leave Heizer?
I left Heizer to seek more balance in my life. Heizer was an all-consuming
effort for the better part of eight years and frankly, I didn't have a
life. :) So, I spent about six months taking it easy, visiting with friends
and family, exploring non-computer interests, etc. I didn't stay out of
touch with HyperCard though. I spent some time consulting for Jeff Thomas at Learning Systems Consultants
(LSCI) in Colorado Springs, Colorado and consulted for Heizer in it's sale
to Royal Software (the new owners of Heizer Software, run by a great guy
by the name of Ro Nagey).
What's Ray doing now?
Now that Ray Heizer has sold Heizer
Software, he's back to Microsoft Excel consulting and looking for new business
opportunities.
Tell us about Scene Slate.
LSCI has a wonderful authoring tool called Scene
Slate. It's a HyperCard standalone targeted at multimedia authoring
in the education market. Their approach is interesting in that instead
of focusing on tools, they focused on media. In other words, instead of
using ResEdit to import a sound resource and then creating a button and
then adding a Play command to the button to play a sound, you simply select
"Play a Sound" from the media menu and the button is created
automatically, the sound is imported, etc. Integrated help, including Apple
Guide, abounds and lots of little extras specific to the education market
and classroom environments are included. I particularly appreciated the
power of HyperCard in that HyperCard -- an authoring tool -- was used to
create a completely different authoring tool. Now that's a tool!
LSCI took me to Boston MacWorld last August
where I worked their booth. It was just the right time to get back in touch
with the industry. I ran into Stuart Henigson of Allegiant
Technologies, Inc., makers of SuperCard. Stuart suggested I come down
for a visit and take a look at a new product they were putting together
-- at that time code-named Black Hole.
So, I visited Allegiant in San Diego, California
and liked what I saw.
So you started working at Allegiant?
They hired me as Product Manager -- Internet Products and Services. They
brought me on board primarily to bring Black Hole to market. Black Hole
grew out of a product idea proposed by Mark Hanrek (visit his Information Workshop web site). Black
Hole became Marionet,
a scriptable internet protocol server. Essentially, Marionet is a faceless
background application that knows about popular internet protocols like
the web, newsgroups, email, ftp, etc. You can call upon it from an XCMD,
AppleEvents, or AppleScript. It makes it real easy to add internet hooks
to custom software such as HyperCard stacks, Director movies, or SuperCard
projects.
Check it out -- a fully-functional trial version of Marionet and full
manual can be downloaded. The reviews have been good with five mice from
MacUser UK and nice write ups in other publications like Infoworld and
TidBits. Apple Computer even purchased a large site license recently.
What do you think of Apple's plans for HC 3.0?
After almost nine years, HyperCard's code base is getting pretty long in
the tooth. It desperately needs cross-platform support, integrated color,
and lots of other stuff. A marriage between HyperCard and QuickTime delivers
all that and more. This sounds like lots of fun -- almost like HyperCard
1.0 all over again.
Apple has expressed a strong commitment to the past, promising that most
stacks developed under previous versions of
HyperCard will make the transition to the
new model with minimal tweaking. Even XCMDs will be supported, at least
on the Mac platform, and some new, as yet unannounced, form of cross-platform
extensibility will be provided too.
I've read with interest many of the HyperCard
3.0 discussions on America Online (keyword MHC) and on the HyperCard mailing
list. A lot of users are very confused and/or concerned by the move to
QuickTime, I think unnecessarily. What I've noticed is that much of the
negativity and concerns about this new design come from users confusing
the product (HyperCard) with the technology (QuickTime).
Users are thinking that stacks are going to
be movies which brings up all kinds of concerns about time-based vs. card-based
design, concerns that movies can't be applications, etc. HyperCard is HyperCard.
It's very easy to add custom tracks to QuickTime that define frames or
collections of frames as cards and backgrounds; users won't have to worry
about it. A stack of cards will still be a stack of cards.
QuickTime is highly extensible; adding new
objects such as fields and buttons and pop-up menus is not that hard to
do, plus developers will be able to create new kinds of objects as well.
Apple will provide a playback environment, akin to the current player,
that will be widely available and there is no reason that a "stack"
can't be grafted onto the player making a standalone just like HyperCard
does today.
Other users are concerned that there seems
to be a strong multimedia focus in this move which they say they don't
need. I say QuickTime does black and white just as well as it does color.
Users need to chill out a bit on this negative
stuff, some of the wild speculation is really getting out of hand. When
users finally see what it is, they'll know Apple has some really exceptional
people on the team who do understand HyperCard.
What are your future plans?
I left Allegiant this June after about nine months. Marionet, at the time
of this writing, is at version 1.11 and it's been well received. I was
ready for a new challenge. After hearing Apple's plans for HyperCard 3.0
and QuickTime 3.0, I want to be involved.
When all is said and done, my commitment to
HyperCard remains firm. After a short break, I'm off to Florida to team
up with Ro Nagey of Royal Software. Ro is the new owner of Heizer, having
bought the company earlier this year. I'm working on at least one book
with Ro on how HyperCard has empowered businesses over the years to be
more successful (if HyperCard has empowered you to be more successful --
contact Ro and maybe we'll want
to include your story in the book!). I'll also be helping Ro focus Heizer
on HyperCard 3.0 and the range of exciting opportunities it creates.
After that, who knows, but whatever I do will
involve HyperCard as far into the future as I can see. :)
E-mail Brian Molyneax (bmolyneaux@value.net)
Brian will be largely offline during August due to the MacWorld Boston Expo and his travels. If you attend MacWorld, come by Apple's Greenhouse and say hi. He'll be at the Royal Software/Heizer Software station.
E-mail HyperCard Heaven (hcheaven@aol.com) about this interview and your letter might get printed on our "--Comments" page.