Software Sketches for Indonesia

I have a series of four tutorials which I have finished, although the Internet! tutorial I want to work on a lot more. These are the "applications" I have been working on. They are "finished" in the sense that they are fully functional and (hopefully) debugged. But any program can be improved upon. I love programming now: it's totally interdisciplinary in its demands, totally unlimited in its possiblilites, and so rewarding when you see a user's face light up with joy.

Introducing the Enhanced Notepad, Catat!

Screenshot of notepad applicationCatat has a lot of neat features. It's more than a desk accessory; I designed it as a tool with which students could experiment while learning how to edit text with a computer.

Features

  1. Everything you move over has balloon help, like the photocopy machine above, except for the main field.
  2. You can turn off balloon help if you like.
  3. Tolong! takes you to a fully documented, linked help section.
  4. A QuickTime movie gives a demonstration of the stack's capabilities.
  5. When you cut, you hear a *snip* sound. When you hit the trash can to throw away something, you hear *rip* and *crumple* sounds. Of course, when you turn the page, there's a satisfying *shwip!* sound. And so on.
  6. The computer speaks in Indonesian to give feedback for certain errors, like if you want to turn the page, but you're already on the last page.
  7. <Baru> gives you a new page, with a *tick* sound.
  8. Current page and total pages are reflected by the numbers above the glue <lem> jar.
  9. Home takes you to an Indonesian Home card.
  10. Stop quits HyperCard.
  11. There is an undo feature accessible from a menubar menu
  12. If you don't select anything, the button's action is applied to the entire card.

ColorKetik! (a simple text editor)

Screenshot of a text editor.

This is trying to be a "real" text editor. It's called ColorKetik! here just to differentiate it from the black and white version of Ketik! I made it in black and white as well to improve performance and make it operable on old Macs.

It has some unique characteristics:

What's Different

Documents are saved automatically when the application is closed by either choosing Home or Stop. A dialog checks to make sure the user really wants to leave the environment.

Since it's really a stack-- ie., a document type-- each user can have their own stack. Within the stack they save all their documents. When writing a thesis, for instance, a student could make each chapter a dokument within the stack. In ColorKetik!, the numbers in the lower left hand corner represent not page numbers, but the number of dokuments stored in the student's stack.

You have a few options for navigation. You can either move forward and backward through your documents with the arrow keys, or you can click in the title field and a menu pops up listing all your documents. Selecting one of the titles in the menu takes you to that title.

A new, untitled document is automatically given the title "belum ada judul" and the menu list is updated. To rename a document, simply click in the title field. The program is smart enough to know whether you are clicking and want to change the title, or clicking and want the title list menu to pop up.

The bar at the bottom which says print is like balloon help; it shows what you are over at the moment without the annoyance of balloons popping up in your face all the time. It says print now because the hand is over the printer icon.

Buttons

So many people mistake the fotocopy machine for a printer, I decided to make it the printer this time; with Ketik! you can print your documents. At printing time they are formatted into fully styled pages. As an alternative, you can export your documents as Rich Text for editing in a "real" word processor. To do so, press the button between the printer and the "baru (new)" icon. It's also a good way to make a quick backup of your work.

The Copy button now features a little camera icon.

Next to the printer is an <X> for Undo.

Under the glue jar button for Paste, we have buttons for text formatting: plain, bold, italic, and underline. Below those four are two pop-up menus, one for fonts (Huruf) and one for size (Ukuran). With all six of these buttons, if no text is selected, the whole document is formatted in the given style.

The trash can, when clicked, will delete the current document, but not without warning.

You can't see it, but the menubar at the top of the screen has pull down menus for Arsip (File), Edit (Edit), Huruf (Font), Gaya (Style), Besar (Size), and a couple other things. You can use these instead of the buttons if you like.

If the user selects text in the edit field, and then clicks, a contextual menu pops up (like in Netscape) with cut, copy, paste, and formatting commands right there. So you don't have to go all the way to the buttons or to the menubar to format or edit your text. Unfortunately, I haven't yet made it so you can just drag and drop the selected text to another location.

Web page by j.a. - last updated 10/20/96