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Preview of Multi-Finder and Hyper-Card
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The new Apple Multi-Finder and Bill Atkinson's Hyper-Card was
demonstrated today (17/8/87) at the University of Melbourne to a
small audience. 

Multi-Finder is a new Apple Finder that allows you to open multiple
applications simultaneously. At the moment, it doesn't allow you to
perform true multi-tasking on the Macintosh but it is hoped that in
the near future, multi-tasking will be achieved on the Macintosh.

At the moment, to launch Multi-Finder, it has to be selected as the
start-up application via the menu option. Once Multi-Finder has been
launched, it allows the user to open multiple documents while having
the Multi-Finder desktop still in the background. This is similiar to
the Amiga and Atari ST's multi-tasking interface. With many applications
open at the same time, you can switch between applications easily by
either clicking in the drag-bar of the window belonging to the
application you want to reactivate or you can select the application
whose name which has been installed at the bottom of the apple menu.

Currently, Multi-Finder only supports print spooling as a background
task. The recommended configuration for Multi-FInder is 2mB as each
opened application consumes RAM. The memory usage of each application
can be viewed by selecting the "About Finder ..." from the apple menu.
This displays bar graphs of the memory usage and available memory.

For the past two years, Bill Atkinson has been working on Hyper-Card
after completing MacPaint. Hyper-Card is a very radical approach to 
idea storage and processing. Hyper-Card is based on the concept of
hyper-text and allows you to link ideas together at the same time,
mixing text with graphics. Hyper-Card is based on the concept of cards
where each card can consist of text or graphics. On each card, buttons
can be installed. These buttons allows links to be made to other cards
so that if a button is clicked, the card that it is linked to is
displayed. For example, if you click on the hat of a picture of a man
wearing a hat, another card with the picture of a hat will be displayed.

Hyper-Card also supports its own programming language so that 
Hyper-Card style applications can be written. One example that was
demonstrated consisted of an interactive world atlas. If the region
of Europe on the world map was clicked, the map of Europe was displayed.
If France was selected, the map of France with the major cities was
displayed. At this low level, other options can be "called-up", for
example, you can get the average weather for that region, exchange
rates, hotels, stored addresses in that country, airlines and so forth
including customs.

At a recent meeting of Apple Consortium members and dealers in the US
from the major universities, Bill Atkinson demonstrated Hyper-Card. It
is reported that when he finished, the audience gave him a standing
ovation - the first ever given to a programmer.

Another new innovation that was revealed in Hyper-Card was the concept of
"tear-off" menus. This allows the user to select a menu which consisted
of a MacPaint-like pallete of paint tools and move it off the menu bar
onto the desktop. This has to be seen to be believed.

Hyper-Card also remembers the last 100 cards that were displayed and
the user is able to call up a miniature display of the contents of the
100 cards. This alone is quite a feat as Bill Atkinson had to devise
a new algorithm to do this as shrinking the contents of the card alone
would not have sufficed as this would have resulted in just black
rectangles but in Hyper-Card, the miniaturised displays can be clearly
recognised.

Currently, Hyper-Card doesn't support colour and its dimensions are
limited to 342x512 pixels to conform to the standard Macintosh screen.
This allows Hyper-Card to be compatible with the Mac Plus, Mac SE and
the Mac II. Hyper-Card can run on Apple-Share but should only be done
if all the accessible cards are read-only. This is because Hyper-Card
saves everything whenever a card is modified. Another reason for the
limitations were because many corners had to be cut to keep it fast.
Also, each such card takes up only 1.5K of memory and it can have as
much detail as an average 16K MacPaint file. As a result, you can 
have over 300 cards on a standard 800k disk. Hyper-Card is fast,
even on an SE.

Apple is committed to making Hyper-Card the media in which all their
new tutorials and helps will be released. Hyper-Card and Multi-Finder
will be released in Australia in October.

A/UX
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Apple UNIX was also demonstrated. It conforms to the System V validation
suite and includes many 4.2bsd improvements. The recommended configuration
is 4mB of RAM, 68551 PMU chip and an 80mB hard disk. At the moment, the
recommended number of users that can be on at any one time is 3. It
supports multi-tasking and allows you to develop Macintosh applications
in a UNIX enviroment and vice-versa. You can also start Macintosh
applications from within A/UX but will not allow you to go back into
A/UX without rebooting. This can be remedied by modifying the application
to support A/UX but this will cause the application to not be compatible
with non-A/UX macintoshes. A/UX will be released in Australia in early
1988 though the official release date in the US is sometime in October.

A new ImageWriter PS(?) was announced which will have 261dpi quality.
This is almost the same quality of a LaserWriter Plus. Its speed at
quality mode is said to be 120 characters per second as is guessed that
it will sell at around A$2200 (Uni Consortium price), maybe more - the
author cannot remember the exact price.

J.T. Teh
jteh@mulga.oz.australia
> Be free to repost this message anywhere as long as it is posted in full
> with the author's name - J.T.