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On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
Reminds me of Apple's stance on mice with two or more buttons. To this day they still make them so it looks like it has one (or no) buttons.
Jobs had the balls to do to Hypercard what Adobe didn't do to Flash. If Hypercard was so amazing then why did products like Supercard fail. It matched Hypercard's feature set and was able to run on Windows and Macs.
HyperCard would have been a great platform if it was aggressively iterated. Despite being way ahead of its time in 1987, it died because it stood still and the world eventually passed it by.
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What about Adobe Animate? Granted, I haven’t actually tried, but my understanding is that it is like Flash but targeting the modern web.
I haven't tried it, though if I recall they've greatly started de-emphasizing the coding aspect of it. Even still, I don't believe I can export directly to anything supported nowadays, right? Does the HTML5 exporter work?
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What about Adobe Animate? Granted, I haven’t actually tried, but my understanding is that it is like Flash but targeting the modern web.
What about Adobe Animate? "Get Animate as part of Adobe Creative Cloud for just US$20.99/mo." from https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html It would be a hard thing to ask various professions that developed content using HyperCard to fork over the money.
I wrote a blog post about how endemic this problem has become across the industry, Everything Old Isn't New Again (Yet) https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old
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> You have to learn web programming to do anything. Sorry, but I don't see how that is at all different than "you have to learn the Hypercard scripting language to do anything."
You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice, but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if short, "c…
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You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice, but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if short, "c…
Not that risable: my 11 year old has gone through the Python Crash Course book and built a basic Django pizza ordering website with a database in a day. That’s after work his way through much of the book, of course, but... as with any complex domain, the right teacher can make a big difference.
There has been nothing stopping other companies from releasing HyperCard-style tools for the Mac. And many have. But they have (as far as I'm aware) not dominated nor flourished particularly well.
What may have seemed amazing to a few people -- including me; I loved HyperCard as a kid! -- was possibly simply not the most valuable use of time, especially for a company trying to dig itself out of the hole Apple was in during the late 90s.
As far as "use" and "programming" being kept separate in modern computers:
1) I don't think this is something a company even as powerful as Apple can control. Third parties would fill in the gap if masses of people were clamoring for a HyperCard-like experience. And arguably they have. You're reading this in a web browser, right?
2) I just don't buy that we're in some digital dystopia with an Iron Curtain between "users" and "programmers." What you can do with a computer just with "use" and not "programming" is just insane compared to the 1990s. "Non-technical" people who need to get something done can find a wide range of powerful tools to do the job. No one needs to make a calculator from scratch. No one needs to make most of the software tools they need in the day-to-day from scratch. And, again, there are plenty of available tools that allow for light scripting to give "non-programmers" even more control. And of course there are professional programmers who can do things with computers that lay people cannot. This would be true regardless of the existence of HyperCard.
I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that…
It seems to me the authors claim is that HyperCard did not belong to Jobs’s vision of a computer as basically an appliance. HyperCard fit better in a vision where a computer was more of a tool.
I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that…
I think you've about got it. I don't think this was Apple's attempt to stifle the ability to code on your own computer. They shipped Project Builder on, what, day 1 of Mac OS X? It's more likely that… …this was not super popular, as what's the possible market for an app that builds applets that only work on Macs? Given Mac marketshare at the time, maybe not a lot of hobbyists who (a) wanted to make an app, but (b) di…
Carbon existed in OSX.