User Profile for Chilton Webb

SuperCard 4.5 (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X)

SuperCard's why I'm a Mac user  

Almost 15 years ago I switched to Amigas briefly, and my coworker convinced me to seriously consider the upcoming Windows release. But I saw one app done in SuperCard, and it changed my perception of how things should work, forever. Our boss had hired a consultant to write an app for him. I watched in complete amazement as the consultant built the working app as my boss told him what he wanted. There was no compile, no crashes, no recompile, no fancy programming language, basically nothing I'd come to know as routine programming fare. Just a working, fast app that he built on demand, by typing English phrases instead of code, and drag and drop objects. Not being much of a programmer at the time, I started wondering if I was doing things 'wrong' somehow. Today, I'm still a programmer, and spend most of my time tweaking lower level code in CodeWarrior and XCode. But when I need something done quick, I fire up SuperCard and get it done. My SuperCard apps never crash, don't suck processor time or memory, work in OS9 and OSX with no recompile, and work right, the first time. All Macintosh software should work this well. I suspect this is another 'zero bug' release, which is something of a tradition for SuperCard releases. Unlike other languages, I doubt this will be followed a week from now with another release fixing some trivial bug they couldn't be bothered to fix the first time through. I for one am glad they took the time and did it right. The 'language' for SuperCard is English. It's so easy, anyone who can speak English can write an app in it. That's no exaggeration. The new help system is blazingly fast, and makes finding info on any topic a click or two away. Every Mac user should own a copy of SuperCard. -Chilton (apparently, a fan of the product) [alert admin]

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Monday, March 28 2005 @ 12:10 PM PST

iStill 1.0 (Mac OS X)

(reply from the author)  

>Do you really think its going to replace a scanner? Yes, it already has for me, for most of my image capture needs. See the site for the types of things you can scan with it, and specifically how it's better than a traditional scanner (and how it's not). It's not going to make flatbed scanners obsolete. They definitely have their place. I use one for scanning full page documents, and for capturing high res pictures of old photos. But iStill and my iSight have completely replaced it for every other type of scanning need. There is a genuine need for a realtime scanning solution on the Mac, and this is it. >All the "scans" I did came out blurry and useless. You're probably trying to use a deep scan on a moving object. That's similar to moving an object around in front of a traditional camera with the shutter wide open. If you can keep the target still and the camera still, you'll get a better image than the iSight can normally take. If you can't guarantee the stability of the target or the camera, set the depth to the minimum. There's info in the readme about this. >Maybe if it came with some directions... I put them in the readme. There's not much there, because this app only does a few things (but does them well). >So if its just stills you want with the iSight there are much better apps out there. I haven't found one. I looked high and low for one and came up empty. Don't get me wrong here, I have a strict policy of not competing with other Mac developers, which is largely why my work hasn't strayed into the shareware market until recently. But after a very exhaustive search, I came up with absolutely nothing that did what iStill does. Am I wrong? Is there ANYTHING ELSE out there? Anything even slightly better? I'm not saying there isn't, but I've not been able to find it if it exists. -Chilton [alert admin]

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Thursday, December 25 2003 @ 02:54 PM PST

Excellent  

Thank you very much! Feedback is immensely helpful to me, so even negative criticisms are welcome. That said, I think I enjoy the positive ones slightly more ;-) -Chilton

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Friday, July 29 2005 @ 02:50 PM PDT

Re:Well done.  

Thank you. I share your thoughts on the Max Scan option. Unfortunately, right now the Max Scan option is at the mercy of the QuickTime image capture engine, which is strangely slow as tar sometimes. It is evident that there's a faster way to capture the data, and simply taking a screenshot is instantaneous, so I'm pretty sure there's something I can do to speed that up. Or at least put a nice progress bar…

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Wednesday, December 24 2003 @ 07:11 PM PST