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Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

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Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#121

Post by jandrese »

arbirk wrote: post #113

Hypercard was great as a drag and drop "app" builder. Apple actually coded up iWeb a few years later, for which Hypercard could have been an excellent foundation. There is still no great tool for preschoolers to start programming. Scratch is great but limited by its web and flash roots. I have very fond memories of getting balls to bounce on edges and sprites as a kid. RIP Hypercard

There has been some idle speculation over the years that adding a way to load stack pages over the network would have created the interactive web back in the prehistoric web days. The flipside of this is it would have been basically Flash, complete with all of the security nightmares that entails. Old MacOS was not built with security in mind. Also of course it would have been trapped on Macs.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#122

Post by jandrese »

chasing wrote: post #98

I don't buy this argument. 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 ou…

> 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.

None of them shipped with the OS. Maybe today it would make more sense to ship something like a Livecode educational version on Raspbian.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#123

Post by dougb5 »

The Apple IIgs had a port of Hypercard, but as I recall it was too slow and buggy, and it got very little traction. I was an avid user of a similar tool called HyperStudio. I looked it up just now and to my surprise it's still alive -- there's a Mac version now under different ownership but with similar features, and it's used in classrooms. https://www.hyperstudio.com

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#124

Post by blablabla123 »

I've never seen it in such detail since this was before my (Apple) time. On the other hand in the 90s there was a ton of point-and-click Rapid Application Development software available as Shareware. I used that software since programming with general purpose tools was not very accessible because of little free documentation, steep learning curves and often costly tools. Unfortunately anything more complex than a recursion level of 1 was usually impossible.

As time passed by I eventually ended up buying Delphi 3, just to find out that it was less intuitive than the Delphi 2 Shareware that I used excessively until then. Nowadays I even recommend non-technical people to take a look at Python when they consider writing anything more complex than an Excel formula. I'd be surprised if such tools ever become popular again.

> And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of

> HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then

> read this post again. And if you continue to think so, then you might

> be an autistic typical software "engineer," and please don't waste

> your time commenting here. Sink back into the cube farm hellpit from whence you came.

Seems you ultimately need to go ad hominem to argue for this kind of software in 20xx.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#125

Post by xkeysc0re »

marrvelous wrote: post #117
xkeysc0re wrote: post #88

Myst was originally built using HyperCard, which I always thought was rather clever

Which lead to a pretty magical moment for me as a kid. Turns out it’s trivial to write a HyperCard program that opens another HyperCard stack and extract its source code. Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in plain text. They didn’t even try to obscure it. It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional development. They had us…

Wow that's amazing! I bet you could probably still do that today if you found an original version and ran it on the hardware.

It's interesting to read here (http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html) how they used HyperCard as sort of just the "front end" to dispatch external commands and connect it all together. I just used Godot to make a game, my first that I've ever completed (including save/load functionality!). The interface and UI building tools, once you climb the gentle learning curve, are really quite incredible and the theming options gives you extensibility to define your aesthetic. If programming languages like Python or even Rust had this sort of quality WSYIWYG VB-style form editor, I think we could see a renaissance in desktop apps. I know at one time the Godot folks were considering Python as the scripting language for the engine.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#126

Post by simonh »

CharlesW wrote: post #118
simonh wrote: post #112

HyperCard broke all the UI conventions of the Mac. You couldn’t use it to create native look and feel Mac apps.

You absolutely could (I did a couple enterprise-y projects with HyperCard during that era), but it required dedication and discipline.

Fair enough, but I don't think that would be convincing to Jobs. It being hard to make apps idiomatic isn't ideal for an Apple development product. I suspect his view would be that this is a space better filled by an independent company that cares about such a product.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#127

Post by dasil003 »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #105

The walled garden rant is anachronistic. HyperCard died because Apple stopped major work it. Circa 1987! There was no HyperCard team to put out a new version when Jobs returned in 1997, and a dying Apple couldn’t justify building one from scratch. It’s that simple. (Yes, there were post-1987 updates, none of which added fundamental critical features like color support. Which was introduced to the Mac lineup with the…

You nailed it. There wasn't some machiavellian plan at work, it's just that HyperCard was not a killer app, and not something that would help a struggling 90s-era Apple. It was one of many cool concept apps that came out of the early PC-era, and although it personally captured my 10-year-old imagination like no other, from a business perspective it never achieved the prominence or practicality of your FileMaker Pros and Microsoft Accesses.

Also, Steve Jobs wasn't even at Apple for the critical phase of HyperCard's life cycle. By the time he returned in 1997 there had been no meaningful investment in HyperCard for many years, and it's lack of a native networking paradigm meant that even if Apple had thrown their weight behind it, it would not have been possible to catch up to the web which was already well past critical mass at that point.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#128

Post by seumars »

jayd16 wrote: post #106

I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so tedious.

You're not taking into the account the context in which Hypercard existed, that is, a time where UI design was in its infancy.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#130

Post by seumars »

burlesona wrote: post #5

Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.

>not initially as elegantly or powerfully

i wouldn't call the web elegent or powerful today either

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