HyperCard is supposed to be an open system; once you acquire a HyperCard stack, you can usually snoop around in it, see how it works, alter it, use ideas from it, and so forth. But snooping around can also be rather tedious and difficult; sometimes objects are invisible, or otherwise concealed; and moving from card to card, and examining scripts one by one, can get to be a little like the old TV game of Concentration, as you try to piece together bits of a puzzle of which you are allowed to view only a tiny portion at any one time. A stack supplied with the developerΓÇÖs version of HyperCard 2.0 allows the exporting of a stack's scripts; but you have to leave HyperCard to open the resulting textfile and examine or print the results, and besides, scripts are only part of the story.
What one would really like is to be able to gather automatically a compact conspectus of all a stackΓÇÖs features: all the properties and settings of all its buttons and fields, and the text inside its fields, as well as its scripts. That is what this stack does. It does create some ancillary textfiles recording its results, which you can then examine or print later; but it also permits you to look at those results immediately, from within HyperCard (without having to open a word processor to look at a textfile).
My own reason for wanting a stack like this one, however, was not so as to snoop at other peopleΓÇÖs stacks, but so as to be able to keep better track of my own as I was writing them. I often find, as I develop a stack, that I misplace a piece of script, or that I have forgotten the name of a field, or that I would like the rect of a button on one card to match that of another button on a different card; sometimes I have used pre-existing backgrounds to build my own stacks, only to discover later that they contained hidden fields or buttons I knew nothing about. For these reasons and many others, this stack has made it far easier for me to keep track of what I am up to when I am writing stacks. (The happiest part of writing it, in fact, was when I reached the "bootstrap" point of being able to use the stack to analyze itself and aid in its own further development!)
If any of these experiences sounds at all like yours, and if you don't already have a snooper of your own, you will probably find a use for this stack.
Please note that this stack does create textfiles, in the same folder as the stack you are analysing. If you donΓÇÖt want these around later you will need to delete them manually. Sorry about that.
