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Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

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Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#81

Post by Suppafly »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #28

Excel I just went through the tutorials for a first time in about a decade (the Make Your First Pivot Table template on the home screen) and was really surprised at how they used slides with buttons (insert > shape, then right click and link to a cell reference) jumping to the next worksheet, reminded me of hypercard from a market adoption standpoint, nothing else in this thread has much traction in allowing non-prog…

Powerpoint is the first thing that came to mind for me. Obviously it misses some of the simplicity of hypercard, but from a slide/card based point of view, it's pretty similar and is very powerful in ways that most people don't realize.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#83

Post by musicale »

sea6ear wrote: post #22

My suggestions would be Tcl/Tk or Pico 8. Tcl/Tk is still the easiest way I have found to make small gui apps and the language and standard library is small enough to keep in your head easily. Pico 8 is my recent love. It's a great way to make small retro style games. There's a free educational edition or you can pay $15 for the full version which has some extra export options. I've been playing with it for the past…

Tk was well designed and implemented. I'm still nostalgic for the Tk canvas object.

Python/tkinter isn't bad either.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#84

Post by Leftium »

It doesn't exist yet, but I want to make a programmable LOGO turtle for VR/AR.

Besides teaching programming, I think it could become a scripting tool to help create experiences in VR/AR.

My first introduction to programming was via LOGO writer (although I didn't even realize I was learning programming until much later.)

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#85

Post by AustinCodeMonki »

Livecode is the commercial version. It used to have a community edition (free) but that was discontinued in 2021. The various other alternatives (Supercard was clunky and apparently doesn't run on 64-bit systems, PythonCard is dead, Shoes is effectively dead) besides Decker would be something like Delphi (ObjectPascal). There used to be a wxWindows-based system but that seems to have died also.

These days most folks would push you towards HTML / CSS / Javascript and possibly Node.js or Deno. In my mind Hypercard was the bridge between desktop programming and web development. Realistically that's not really bad advice.

For desktop programming, Dart/Flutter (Google recently laid off parts of those teams) are viable as are Python/Kivy (or even Python/Tkinter since Tkinter comes bundled with Python). You might also want to look at the DragonRuby Game Toolkit (Ruby).

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#86

Post by jhbadger »

zqfm wrote: post #8

I cut my teeth on HyperCard and I'd say that the web (HTML, JavaScript) is a pretty good successor. Getting an image on a page and then linking between pages is quite satisfying when you're starting out. Something like a basic web page is great for a beginner but there's the whole gamut from there up to 3d games and virtual machines (wasm) to advance to when you're ready.

In the beginning of the Web the connections between Hypercard and the Web were known and intentional -- many early web browsers also included HTML editors because it was thought the Web would be a two-way street with users both reading pages and writing their own. The author of ViolaWWW (an early 1990s web browser) originally created it as an attempt to bring something like Hypercard to UNIX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#87

Post by jhbadger »

WillAdams wrote: post #68
surfingdino wrote: post #51

SuperCard? https://www.supercard.us/

Unfortunately, not really an option since it's still 32-bit: https://www.supercard.us/purchase.html >SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. This means it is not compatible with Catalina (macOS 10.15) or later versions of macOS.

Same with HyperStudio, which is a shame.

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#88

Post by AstroJetson »

ericd wrote: post #78
AstroJetson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VEXIQ is what we use. It has a little sister called VexGO it’s limit is the 4 channel brain. All of the mechanical parts are interchangeable, so do some VexGO, then add more motors, sensors, etc with VexIQ

Thanks for the pointer, these look awesome (not cheap, but well designed to not be too frustrating for kids). Trying to figure out if it can handle proper full res camera input, looks like the optical sensor is a bit limited. Maybe these ports don't have enough bandwidth, tho. EDIT: Looks like the Exp level has the "AI Vision Sensor"

You would be surprised what you can do without the camera. The EXP/V5 camera is a closed garden, for example it can't do April tags yet.

Two schools of thought are 1)Software is the key to robotics - so the more powerful brain / camera is the selling point 2) Mechanical interfaces to the physical world is the key - the VIQ ecosystem makes this practical at a pretty low cost. If you root around on ebay for HEXBUG VEX ROBOTICS you can see lots of the plastic kits for sale that can give you parts that make something that you can later frankenmash into other things.

Good luck with your adventures!

Re: Ask HN: Modern day equivalent to HyperCard?

#89

Post by ericd »

AstroJetson wrote: post #88
ericd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the pointer, these look awesome (not cheap, but well designed to not be too frustrating for kids). Trying to figure out if it can handle proper full res camera input, looks like the optical sensor is a bit limited. Maybe these ports don't have enough bandwidth, tho. EDIT: Looks like the Exp level has the "AI Vision Sensor"

You would be surprised what you can do without the camera. The EXP/V5 camera is a closed garden, for example it can't do April tags yet. Two schools of thought are 1)Software is the key to robotics - so the more powerful brain / camera is the selling point 2) Mechanical interfaces to the physical world is the key - the VIQ ecosystem makes this practical at a pretty low cost. If you root around on ebay for HEXBUG VEX…

lol awesome. Yeah, I’m kind of considering looking around for something more generic/open, but if it makes it too hard to do the basics, that might kill the enthusiasm well before we get anywhere near needing a camera. And I really like what I see of the mechanical aspects of this system. Thank you so much for letting me know about all this stuff. This is really cool.
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