For immediate release
Contact: Scott Raney (raney@metacard.com), 303-447-3936
METACARD DELIVERS ON THE PROMISE OF HYPERCARD
Boulder, August 19, 1998 --- After 8 years of continuous development,
MetaCard Corporation is now delivering on the promise of HyperCard.
Whether you need it for graphical application development or
multimedia authoring, MetaCard 2.2 has the features to make the job go
quickly and smoothly:
* Support for Windows 3.1/95/98/NT, all popular UNIX platforms, and
new support for MacOS 68K and PowerPC. No preprocessing, recompiling,
redesign, or platform-specific debugging is required to deploy a
product on all platforms simultaneously. MetaCard has a fully
functional development environment on all platforms and doesn't rely
on limited-function "players".
* Native look and feel on all platforms, with cross-platform support
for advanced controls including combo-boxes, hierarchical menus, and a
tab control. Built-in support for popular audio, video, and image
formats means there is no need to hunt down or pay for external
components.
* Build complete single-file double-clickable royalty-free
applications on all platforms: no shared libraries, virtual machines,
browsers, installers, or other add-ons are required. This means no
DLL or JVM version conflicts, and high reliability and lower support
costs for applications you distribute.
MetaCard's easy to learn high-level language (MetaTalk) enables even
non-programmers to build the productivity-enhancing applications they
need. Experienced developers will appreciate the flexibility they
gain from advanced language features like associative arrays, regular
expressions, support for manipulating binary data, and built-in HTTP
GET and POST. MetaTalk offers the power and productivity of Perl
without the syntactic gymnastics.
High-performance "virtual compiler" technology provides script
execution speeds over 5 times faster than HyperCard or SuperCard on
average, and potential performance increases of hundreds or thousands
of times through the use of language features not available in those
tools (benchmarks available on the MetaCard WWW site
http://www.metacard.com).
MetaCard's entire development environment including graphical editor,
script editor, and debugger was built in MetaCard. This not only
demonstrates the power of the tool, but also provides something not
available in any competing tool: you can change any aspect of the
development environment to make it suit your needs.
MetaCard 2.2 is currently in beta test and will be released Q3 1998.
The free MetaCard Starter Kit is available now from the MetaCard WWW
and FTP sites http://www.metacard.com/ and
ftp://ftp.metacard.com/MetaCard and from distributors world wide. The
Starter Kit is a fully functional GUI development and multimedia
authoring tool, but there is a limit on the length of scripts you can
create with it. Purchasing a license key enables the full
functionality of MetaCard. Free converters are available to convert
projects from HyperCard, SuperCard, and OMO (Oracle Media Objects) to
MetaCard.
Pricing is $995 for a single-user, all platform license (that's right:
a single license key can be used on any supported platform, no need to
buy a separate license for each). Educational institutions receive a
50% discount. K12 schools can purchase MetaCard through a special
program for $250 for a 10-user license which comes bundled with
"MetaTalk Programmer", a CBT package that has kids programming in a
matter of hours.
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MetaCard is a registered trademark of MetaCard Corporation. HyperCard
is a registered trademark of Apple Corporation. All other brand and
product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective companies.
