ToolBook: An Electronic Construction Set

The University of Toledo

Asymetrix Corporation bills its multimedia ToolBook program as a «software construction set for Windows». It is that and much more. I first encountered ToolBook as a feature added to Windows 3.0 when I upgraded my computers to that version. This was a «run time» or scaled down version of ToolBook that limits you to experimenting with the accompanying sample programs such as the DayBook with its address book, monthly and weekly calendars, and such. I later noticed that IBM and Zenith were including the complete ToolBook program with the computers that they sell to the academic community. I initially disregarded ToolBook as a viable hypermedia program because the first version was notoriously slow, expensive -unless your copy came with your computer- and not well suited for text-oriented projects such as mine on Rubén Darío, which I have continued to develop in another hypermedia program, Guide¹¹³. Thanks to the Darío project, which I submitted in last year's Zenith Masters of Innovation competition, I won two Zenith 80386 computers and gained access to ToolBook which I immediately upgraded to version 1.5.

Don Crabb, in his review in InfoWorld of version 1.5 of ToolBook, states that it «is really quite a sophisticated programming system. Its feature set is substantial and it extends far beyond what you'll find in HyperCard 2.1»¹¹⁴. Like HyperCard, ToolBook is easy to use. Crabb adds: «If you can use HyperCard, you can probably use ToolBook 1.5 without a second thought -it's that straightforward» (61). Depending on your skill, you can use ToolBook to create applications ranging from simple online presentations and hypermedia documents, to prototypes of more complex programs, extensive databases, and interactive training programs. You can also translate existing HyperCard stacks into ToolBook format thanks to a program from Heizer Software called ConvertIt!. I converted the stacks that make up my electronic edition of Prosas profanas on the Macintosh to ToolBook format and experimented from there¹¹⁵. Though Mr. Crabb's praise for ToolBook is well deserved, my experience has uncovered a number of pitfalls along the way. Some relate to the hardware and software that you must have while others have to do with the programming skills that you will need if you intend to tap the package's full potential.

ToolBook 1.5 comes with two manuals, Using ToolBook and Using OpenScript (its programming language) which are essentially unchanged from version 1.0. The price from most discount software vendors is about $300.00, but Asymetrix sells it at an educational discount price of $149.00. It also sells a second, multimedia version for $265.00 which contains the additional special programs that facilitate the use of CD-ROM, videodisc and other external devices through the Windows interface. The «Educational Ten-Pack» of ToolBook 1.5 sells for $1,000, and they market an «evaluation edition» for $49.95 that contains an on-line tutorial and a set of sample applications. Asymetrix now also supplies a «run time» version of ToolBook that you can distribute free with your materials so that colleagues and students can use your programs without having to own a full copy of ToolBook. For $595.00 annually you can subscribe to Asymetrix Developer's Services which opens the doors to extensive consultation with resource personnel and service engineers¹¹⁶.There is also an excellent, easy-paced introduction to ToolBook published by The Cobb Group titled ToolBook Companion and written by Joseph R. Pierce¹¹⁷. Several other booklets come with the upgrade such as the notes pertaining to changes and additions in version 1.5, an «ideas» book, and a catalog of books and services in which I found a ToolBook project of interest already available, «El avión hispano», a video disc application from Cornell University¹¹⁸. Asymetrix's publicity materials includes a very attractive presentation on Brigham Young University's use of ToolBook as part of its MonteVidisco project. Heizer Software -see below- sells Language Flash Cards created in ToolBook in French, German and Spanish. Each contains a vocabulary of 1500 words for students, tourists and business travelers and sells for $15.00 each.

What sets ToolBook apart from the other hypermedia programs on the Mac and the PC is its extensive tutorial program. It covers all aspects

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of ToolBook and is the best that I have ever used, particularly the workbook on using OpenScript. What makes it even more appealing is that it is «open», that is to say that you can examine the scripts and learn how the professional programmers created the many interesting things that the tutorial does. You can then copy those scripts and adapt them to suit your needs. But, before you can do anything with ToolBook, you must have Windows 3. 0.

Windows 3.0, the most recent version of Microsoft's graphical user interface -with more than nine million copies sold since its introduction in May of 1990¹¹⁹-, is not only faster than previous versions but it also contains many additional enhancements such as the way it uses memory and addresses the special capabilities of certain computer chips. Version 3.0 makes tremendous strides in eliminating the so-called DOS barrier, that is, it allows Windows programs to use memory beyond the basic 640K of internal memory that comes with each PC. You no longer need to worry with distinctions between «expanded» or «extended» memory because Windows 3.0 makes access to memory beyond the 640K limit automatic. However, in order to take full advantage of this memory management, you should also upgrade your system to DOS 5.0. Windows uses the computer's specific 80286 or 80386/80486 central processing chip in different ways. While it works well with an AT-class PC, an 80286-based computer, it begins to reach its full potential with an 80386- or 80486-based machine. Here, for example, Windows makes use of technology built into the 80386 or 80486 chip called the «protected mode» that allows the user to run multiple programs simultaneously without them conflicting with one another. Windows will also create «virtual memory» on an 80386-or 80486-based PC, a process that uses space on the hard disk to fool the computer into thinking it has more internal memory than it actually possesses. Thus it is possible to run ToolBook, a graphics program such as PC Paintbrush, or a text scanning program like WordScan Plus, and Microsoft Word for Windows, one of the most full-featured and powerful word processing programs that I have ever used, all at the same time, and switch from one to the other by a simple click of the mouse. The only limit to the number of programs that you can run at one time is the memory available in your computer. With four megabytes of internal memory on my Zenith, I have run as many as five simultaneous instances of ToolBook without encountering any problems. The materials that you create in one program and window can be copied to another using the clipboard that is part of the Windows interface. You can also take advantage of Windows' ability to share data with other programs such as Microsoft Excel or Word for Windows through its DDSs (dynamic data exchange) and DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries). However, in order to use these features, you will need to be able to program in Pascal, C, or assembly language. This is roughly the same as writing XCMDs (external commands) and XFCNs (external functions) for HyperCard.

We foreign language teachers and our students will very much appreciate the ease with which Windows allows us to configure the key board by simply selecting the specific foreign language from a Control Panel.

Figure 1

In this case, Windows differs from DOS in that it uses the ANSI -American National Standards Institute- character set which contains many more foreign language characters than DOS's ASCII extended character set, such as the tilde over upper and lower case a (Ã, ã,) and o (Õ, õ) as required in Portuguese. Despite this power and sophistication, Windows 3.0 is easy to install and use, but there is a price. You must have plenty of space on your hard disk and a fast computer.

You need 6 to 8 megabytes of hard disk space to install Windows 3.0 alone, plus an additional 8 megabytes of space to install the complete version of ToolBook, a process that, though effortless, may require nearly fifteen minutes to carry out. You should also have at minimum DOS 3.1, though 5.0 is preferred because of the way it interacts with Windows 3.0, and a VGA monitor to take advantage of the many uses of color that ToolBook allows. I use ToolBook on a 25 mHz 80386 Zenith computer with a fast 150

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megabyte hard disk. I tried using it on what I had considered up to then a reasonably fast Mitac 16 mHz 80286 computer but ToolBook brought it almost to a halt. It was so slow as to make any attempts at developing materials unthinkable. The example of animation in ToolBook failed to animate at all.

Once you install ToolBook, you can then proceed to the QuickTour tutorial program to get acquainted with the program's features. You can enter and exit the tutorial any time you want. This tutorial is one of twenty-seven programs that ToolBook installs on your hard disk. They appear as icons in the form of open books made up of electronic pages.

Figure 2

This metaphor corresponds to the stacks and cards in HyperCard and the guidelines and frames in Guide 3.0¹²⁰. Like other hypermedia programs, ToolBook organizes information -graphics or text- in different layers on backgrounds or foregrounds, and it uses scripts, buttons and links to carry out program functions or to navigate through a «book». Unlike HyperCard with its multiple levels of access ranging from browsing to scripting, in ToolBook you are either an author -with full access to all program functions- or a reader -with only the degree of access that the author has allowed. You toggle back and forth using the F3 key. Among the many objects and features that ToolBook provides there are two that are not commonly found in competing programs, though they can perhaps be duplicated in other ways: hot words and a «link with» command.

One of the problems that a hypermedia author encounters is calling the user's attention to text that functions as a button. In HyperCard, I use a superscripted degree symbol ºº to mark special text. In the more recent versions of this program you can change the color of the text to call the reader's attention to it, but this assumes that your reader has a color monitor. Guide uses underlining, italics and bolded text to designate buttons.

ToolBook allows you to do any and all of this, and it offers an additional feature called «hot words».

A hot word shows up on the screen simply as a word, or group of words -similar in function to «grouped» words in HyperCard 2.0-with a box that ToolBook has automatically drawn around it. In figure 3 I have clicked the mouse on the hot word «autoridad» which reveals the note field in the larger rectangle to the right.

Figure 3

To make a hot word, you simply select the text by pulling the cursor over it with the mouse -you can also use the keyboard- and pressing the combination Ctrl-W. Once you have created a hot word you can attach a script to it just as you would to any other button. In order to keep the text more readable and less cluttered ToolBook lets you turn the hot words off and on by clicking on the appropriate selection in a pull-down menu, or you can write a script that keeps them hidden until the user moves the mouse into a particular area on the screen. In short, hot words provide an easy and consistent way to call the user's attention to buttons in your text.

Once you have created a book, designed its electronic page, brought in or created the text and graphics in ToolBook -or any other hypermedia program for that matter- you will find that you spend the largest part of your time creating ways for your readers to navigate through your materials. To build on the text metaphor, navigation is the process of weaving the electronic threads or links that create the special texture of your project. Once you link one element in a file with another, you face the problem of helping readers to find their way back. ToolBook offers you two options when you create a button or a hot word: «Link to» and «Link with». «Link to» does precisely this: it makes an electronic connection between two items; «Link with» does this and also automatically

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generates the return path. Select the word you want, make it a button or a hot word and, from the dialog box that appears when you create it, choose the «Link with» command. Now, all you need to do is locate your target and tell ToolBook where you want to end the link. ToolBook then creates a button that your reader can use to go back to where he or she just came from. This is a nice touch in what can otherwise become a very complicated process, but it also has some disadvantages. Suppose you frequently link to one file from a number of others. If you use «Link with» each time, you will create a clutter of return-path buttons that will more confuse the user than make things easy. Which «Link with» button returns you to where? You could label them, but it is much easier to make the program, ToolBook or HyperCard, electronically mark down where you are (using the «push» command) and then create but one button on your target page or card to jump («pop») back to where you were no matter which file your link started from.

Like HyperCard, ToolBook provides you with a number of tools and palettes to help you to design your project. While there are many drawing tools, unlike HyperCard, there is no eraser, something that at times is maddening! ToolBook's control over text is excellent. Like a word processor, you can set the font, type size, style, line spacing, paragraph indentations, and justification from dialog boxes that you access from pull-down menus. Some of the keyboard implementations of these commands are unfortunately less than intuitive. For example, after you mark a piece of text you press Control-T to italicize it, when Control-I would have been a much more logical choice. Manipulating the text in ToolBook is the easy part. Entering it is something else.

With the exception of Guide, none of the hypermedia programs that I have worked with make it easy to import text. ToolBook is no exception as it is better equipped to import data from databases than the large quantities of text that we work with. The maximum number of characters that you can fit on any one electronic page is 32,000, which is not much of a problem as you can easily create additional pages. However, ToolBook's import feature limits you to an ASCII file format, thus stripping out all formatting and text styling that you may have done. In version 3.0 of Guide, Owl International added RTF (rich text file, a Microsoft standardized format) to its import filters. If you save your text as a RTF file in your word processor, you can import it into Guide without losing any formatting or styling. But, I have found that Guide's RTF import filter has one odd but serious quirk: it works well only with the text that I saved in the RTF format on my Macintosh! For some reason -I have reported this «bug» to Owl- the RTF import filter strips out all the foreign language accents and diacritical marks from RTF files created on a PC. So much for standardization. Hopefully, one of the next versions of ToolBook will have a fully functional RTF import filter.¹²¹

The text search function in ToolBook is fast and discriminates between accented and unaccented characters, unlike HyperCard. But HyperCard users looking for a «find» will have to learn that it called «search» in ToolBook, one of the many subtle differences between the two programs that I did not discover until I translated my Prosas profanas stack into ToolBook pages with Heizer Software's ConvertIt!¹²²

Using ConvertIt! is like playing with magic. It was fascinating to see my HyperCard stack appear on the PC screen, little by little taking form until it looked, and for the most part behaved, just like it did on my Mac, buttons, fields, scripts and all.

As of this writing, ConvertIt!, retail price $199.00, will only work with HyperCard 1.0-1.2 stacks. It will not convert the more recent 2.0 files and it only converts one way: from HyperCard to ToolBook. Heizer promises an updated version in the «near future». ConvertIt! comes with a fifty page booklet that explains how to install and use the programs of which there are two types: HyperCard stacks that run on the Mac (using HyperCard 1.2 only), and a «book» that you open in ToolBook that completes the conversion process on the PC. Though the booklet states that ConvertIt! was designed to work with version 1.0 of ToolBook, I found that it performed just fine with 1.5.

If you have a large HyperCard stack or a number of stacks to convert, you should seek out the fastest Mac available. It took ConvertIt! one hour on a Mac IIcx to convert my 670K Prosas profanas stack that is made up of over 200 cards with numerous note and vocabulary fields and text buttons. The result of this conversion process is what Heizer calls a HIFF file (Hypermedia Interchange File Format). HIFF files are all text, like PostScript or RTF files, and can easily be opened and altered in a word processor. Once the conversion is complete, you still must transfer the file to your PC, something that is fortunately

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less of a problem with each passing day.¹²³

When ConvertIt! generates the HIFF file, it changes all foreign language accents and diacritical marks to a series of odd text combinations. For example, á becomes \'87, é=\'8E, í=\'92, ó=\'87, ú= \'9C, ñ=\'96, ¿=\'CO and ¡=\'92. Though a problem, this is a minor one. I opened the HIFF file in Microsoft Word for Windows and wrote a macro that automatically searches and replaces the text in a matter of seconds, thus recovering the accents and diacritics.

Now, you finish the conversion process using the ConvertIt! «book» from within ToolBook. ConvertIt! will prompt you to select a file or group of files. It took 2 hours on a reasonably fast 80386 PC to reconstruct my Prosas profanas stack in ToolBook, so allow yourself plenty of time. Do not expect all parts of a HyperCard stack to translate. Since mine was mostly text, there were few problems, but ConvertIt! will not handle many of the sophisticated XCMDs and XFCNs that some stacks use. Depending on the size and complexity of your stacks, there may be fairly substantial clean-up work yet to do. The transparent text buttons that I had created in HyperCard and carefully marked with the superscripted degree sign became gray rectangles in the conversion process as figure 4 shows.

Figure 4

I chose to make all of them hot words. Though my stack converted all but flawlessly, including the images of Darío that I had scanned and used in the Prosas profanas project, I still had to adapt many of the things that I had done in HyperCard's HyperTalk to conform to ToolBook's OpenScript programming language to take advantage of some of the features that are unique to ToolBook itself. Heizer eases the pain of this process by providing an excellent HyperTalk to OpenScript dictionary stack -see figure 5- on the Macintosh and the Macintosh part of ConvertIt! includes explanatory comments in the scripts that it cannot fully translate.

Figure 5

In addition to the dictionary, ConvertIt! will place comments, introduced by a double dash, in the areas where it has problems to guide you to a solution. For example, I clicked on a button in the converted file and instead of it carrying out the command that I had programmed in HyperTalk, I got the following error message:

ConvertIt! tells me that it could not find page 33663 because such a page number does not exist in the converted file. This is because I designated that particular card by its ID number (33663) in HyperCard, something that does not translate to ToolBook format. It cannot find the file called «Related» because OpenScript requires that the file name be designated with the corresponding extension as «Related.tbk.» However, ConvertIt! has at least pointed me in the right direction.

The precise amount of «tweaking» needed to make things work in ToolBook as they did in HyperCard depends on a number of factors. I found that all the combinations of my HyperCard text buttons and the fields that they revealed

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had to be «tweaked» in ToolBook. ConverIt! translated the HyperTalk command to hide a certain field this way:

This did not work properly, so I wound up creating a translation that does:

While I suppose that one could automate this process by writing a script to do so, for those like me, unable yet to program at that level, this becomes a very time consuming process of finding each instance of the problem and correcting it.

Even simple things like moving to the next card in a stack, or the next page in a book, may also require «tweaking». I used the following simple HyperTalk script with its corresponding visual effect to change from one card to another:

But, that visual effect does not exist in OpenScript, so you have to scramble once more and correct it this way:

As inconvenient as this may be, OpenScript's «English like» language is certainly more «English like» that a similar script that I wrote in LOGiiX, the scripting language that Guide has added in version 3.0:

Though this script does several other things, it still begs the question of the definition of «English like» scripting languages. OpenScript has a powerful, built-in debugging program that those adept at programming will undoubtedly appreciate.

There are other differences between HyperCard and ToolBook, such as how you go about compacting a file. As you work on a stack or a book, edit, make changes, add and delete, you wind up with a certain amount of empty space that inflates the file's size. This can affect the speed with which it operates, so it is best to compact the file. In HyperCard, this is as simple as selecting the «Compact Stack» command from the File menu. Such a command does not exist in ToolBook, though I found a script to do this in the «Ideas» booklet that comes with the program.

In addition to experimenting with the converted HyperCard stack, I tried approaching ToolBook head on, using the sample books it placed on my hard disk during the installation process as a starting point. I quickly found an appropriate format in the «Page Ideas» file and began to manipulate it to suit my needs. I copied icons from other files, colored the Azul book blue and did the Prosas Profanas in rose - «Yo he dicho, en la misa rosa de mi juventud, mis antífonas, mis secuencias, mis prosas profanas» Darío tells us in his «Palabras liminares»-, I copied the scanned image of Darío from one of the converted Macintosh stacks and in quick order created my own graphical introduction to the Rubén Darío project (see figure 6). With resources such as this readily available in ToolBook, you can go a long way in creating your particular project without ever having to do any programming.¹²⁴

Figure 6

Though ToolBook has a lot in common with HyperCard, so much so that, with mouse in hand, I sometimes forget which computer I am working on, it would be a serious mistake to just think of it as a simple PC HyperCard clone. Which

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program and computer platform are better? I will leave that up to the professionals in this field. Suffice it to say that these two are at least equal and it looks like the future may well bring us the possibility of developing our materials without regard to which computer will eventually run them. Asymetrix has historically very close ties with Microsoft, so ToolBook will be around for quite some time. If you have been longing to experiment with hypermedia on the PC or have developed materials on the Mac and would like to widen their appeal, and have the proper hard ware, software, and the time to master this program, ToolBook opens up some very exciting avenues of exploration.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 75, Number 2, May 1992