Africa Notebook requires a color Macintosh with at least a 13" screen and at least 4Mb of memory allocated to HyperCard 2.1 or later or HyperCard Player. If you don't have Hypercard 2.0 or later, then please use HyperCard Player (standard on all new Macs) with at least 4Mb allocated. If you have neither, simply download the self-running version (Africa Notebook SR), which is larger but requires no HyperCard or HyperCard Player.
The following text also appears in the help section of the stack. Get there by clicking on the green question mark next to the map:
Version 1.0
This stack is shareware. Please distribute it freely. If you like the program, use the program, or want to encourage me to improve it, please send $10 to:
Max Becher, 49 Crosby St., New York, NY, 10012.
Or keep it free of guilt or payment by sending me suggestions/criticisms to the above address or email to maxb4@aol.com.
If you are running the stack with a full version of Hypercard, then the programming is open, i.e. you can take from it or change it as you like, but please do not distribute your version. If you come up with useful programming improvements and would like them distributed, please contact me at the above addresses.
For version updates and examples of other projects by Max Becher and Robbins/Becher check the web at http://gramercy.ios.com/~mbecher.
Purpose:
Although most futurists point to Asia and Latin America as centers of increasing global importance, I expect the "developing" (recovering) and hopefully cooperating African nations to be of even greater significance. Now that South Africa is under majority rule and the cold war is on hold, Africa may finally realize its full and unequalled potential (unless it is sabotaged by the West or another entity once again.)
This stack is intended to help improve and store one's understanding of Africa by providing a space to enter notes, associate information visually to a map, and a quiz to test recall of country name, capital and head of state.
Function:
The stack has two modes. One mode is NOTES which has fields for the name, capital, and head of state of each of the countries. There is also a Notes field which can be used for collecting data. This field has "already been started" and its contents are not comprehensive geopolitical statistics but rather notes which I find distinctive enough to be memorable and which have increased my curiosity about the various subject.
The other mode is QUIZ which tests for country name, capital, and head of state and counts the number of correct answers.
All the buttons along the bottom of the screen "toggle" on and off like light switches when you click on them. In most cases, whatever they effect can be reversed by clicking them again. For example if you click the "SHOW NAMES" button, all country names show up and the button lights up. When you want to hide them again, click on the same button and it turns off and hides the names.
NOTES mode:
To get to the card for a particular country, simply click on the country label on the small monochrome map on the right.
If you don't know where the country is just make sure that the SHOW NAMES button is on (lit up) and look for it.
You can also press the FIND COUNTRY button and enter the name and find it that way. When you click on a country label or anywhere on the monochrome map, the color map in the middle of the screen will move to the equivalent location. This way you get both an overview and a closeup.
To see the color map in a large window click the LARGE MAP button. Click or drag anywhere on it to move its position within the window.
When you press the HIDE LABELS button all the labels on the small map disappear.
Clicking the QUIZ button brings you to the quiz mode.
QUIZ mode:
To quiz yourself on the name of a country, just click on any of the country labels on the monochrome map and you will get a dialog box asking you for the right answer. Once you enter the country — exact spelling without accents (diacritical marks such as on the é or ç) is required but upper/lower case is not — the stack will show the name on the upper left hand corner of the screen and add 1 point to the country tally. Quizzing yourself on capital or head of state works the same way except you first have to make sure that the corresponding button (CAPITAL or HEAD OF STATE) is on by clicking on it.
If you don't know the answer to a quiz question you can always type in a question mark (?) and the stack will provide the answer by finding the country label, blinking it several times, and showing the card field on the left side of the screen. Once you have used the question mark, however, you cannot answer the same question again unless you restart the quiz by pressing NEW QUIZ.
The names of the countries cannot be changed, but the CAPITAL and HEADS OF STATE fields can be typed into. Whatever is entered into those two fields will be the correct answers in the test. This way you can customize the stack according to your (and probably more informed) view of what is correct or update to recent events. Because the heads of state may change often and their spelling varies, this part of the quiz is probably the most difficult. To make it somewhat easier, you can enter just the last word (which is the person's last name in most cases) of the whole name and this will count as correct in the quiz.
NOTE: answering all quiz questions correctly is near impossible for all but the expert (I've never done it/I'm no expert) — the point is to improve, not despair. The first time you do the quiz, you may disagree with the spelling of heads of state or capitals. In that case just enter your preferred spellings and try the quiz over again
Keyboard Shortcuts:
All the standard Hypercard keyboard shortcuts should work (some may not if this is the self-running version or you are using Hypercard Player). Additional ones are:
In QUIZMODE:
While trying to guess data on each country you will be alternating between the mouse (to click on the next country to guess on) and the keyboard (to type in you guess). You may find this tedious. Instead of clicking on the country label or the NEXT COUNTRY button, you may simply press the TAB key and it will select another country to guess on, making the country label blink several times.
In NOTESMODE:
Clicking on a word in the Notes field while holding down the command () key will cause a search for the next occurence of that word. If the word is bold and is the name of a country, then the stack will go directly to that country's page, like an internet link.
You can add your own "links" this way, i.e. type in the name of a country and just make it bold. Countries with more than one word in them need to have each word made bold seperately (for some reason quirky Hypercard reason which eludes me…) and then the whole country name needs to be grouped by using command ()–G or selecting group in the Style menu.
Selected Bibliography:
• Brian Hunter (editor), The Statesman's Yearbook, 132nd edition, 95-96
• Linda van Buren (editor), New African Yearbook, London, 1994/1995
• Geoff Crowther, Africa on a Shoestring, Hawthorn, Australia,1977
• John Henrik Clarke, Notes for An African World Revolution — Africans at the Crossroads, Trenton, New Jersey, 1991
• Martin Bernal, Black Athena — The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1991
• Tessa Cleaver & Marion Wallace, Namibia Women in War, London and New Jersey, 1990
• Basil Davidson, The Lost Cities of Africa (rev. ed.), Boston/Toronto, 1987
• Cheikh Anta Diop, Precolonial Black Africa, 1987
• Julie Frederikse, None But Ourselves — Masses vs. Media in the Making of Zimbabwe, Harare, 1982
• Peter Gutkind and Peter Waterman (editors), African Social Studies — a Radical Reader, New York and London, 1977
• Robert J. Gordon, The Bushman Myth, Boulder, CO, 1992
• Hammond Universal World Atlas, Maplewood, New Jersey, 1993
• International Defence & Aid Fund, Apartheid's Army in Namibia, London, 1982
• Karen Jacobsen, Zimbabwe, Chicago, 1990
• David Lamb, The Africans, New York, 1984
• Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston, 1965
• Jocelyn Murray, Cultural Atlas of Africa, New York, 1981
• Nangolo Mbumba and Norbert H. Noisser, Namibia in History, London and New Jersey, 1988
• David O'Connor, Ancient Nubia, Philadelphia, 1993
