Contents in Current Page:

1. Notecards - General
2. Notecards - object
3. Notecards - Links
4. Notecards - Browser card
5. Notecards - Filebox object
6. Notecards - Instructional Design Enviroment (IDE)

Notecards - General

Notecards (Halasz, 1987) may be the most famous hypertext system in the  research world because its design has been especially well documented. It was designed at Xerox PARC and is now available as a commercial product. Notecards has been decveloped on the Xerox family of D-machines. These  machines are provide a powerfull Lisp programming enviroment ( InterLisp ).. It gave users the option to customize Notecards to their own special needs since it is fully integrated with the Lisp system.Notecards is build on the four basic kinds of objects: * Notecards * Links * browser card * Filebox Notecards is a general  hypermedia enviroment that is fairly typical of the generation of workstation-based systems that is currently moving from the research lab into widespread use.  Notecards was designed to help people work with ideas. Its intented users are authors , researchers, designers and to anyone engaged in analyzing information , constructing models, formulating arguments, designing artifacts and generally processing ideas. The system provides the user with a network of electronic network interconnected with typed links. This network serves as a medium in which the user can represent collections of related ideas. it also functions as a structure for organizing, storing and retrieving information.

Notecards - object

Each node is a single notecard that can be opened as a window on the screen. Users can have as many notecards open on the screen as they want but quickly risk facing the "messy desktop" problem if they open too many.The notecards can have different types depending on the data they contain.

Notecards - Links

Links in Notecards are typed connections between cards. Links can be displayed as a small link icon or they can shown as a box with the title of their destination card. Users open the destination card in a new window on the screen by clicking on the link icon with the mouse. The link type is a label chosen by the user to  specify the relation between the departure card and the destination card for the link.

Notecards - Browser card

 Browser card is Notecards object which contains a structural overview diagram of the notecards and links.Different link types are indicated by different line patterns in the browser, thus giving the user an indication of the connection among nodes.The browser card is an active overview diagramm and allows users to edit the underlying hypertext nodes and links by carrying out operations on the boxes and lines in the browser.

Notecards - Filebox object

The Filebox object is used for hierarchicalnesting of notecards. Each notecard is listed in exactly one Filebox. Actually the Filebox is a special purpose notecard, so Fileboxes can contain other Fileboxes and it is possible to construct links from other cards to a Filebox.

 Notecards - Instructional Design Enviroment (IDE)

Notecards has been customized in case so extensively that the result was a new system. The Instructional Design Enviroment (IDE) developed at Xerox is built on top on Notecards but provides a new user interface to help courseware developes construct hypertext structures semi automatically. IDE support stucture  accelerators that speed up hypertext construction by allowing the user to generate an entire set of nodes and links from a template with a single action.