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Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

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Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#141

Post by tombert »

seanalltogether wrote: post #64
tombert wrote: post #38

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…

Flash was the perfect tool for someone to go from absolute beginner to fairly proficient developer. You could pick up the tool and the very first thing you could do was draw shapes, or maybe even a robot. Then you figured out you could animate them along a timeline, so now you can make the legs of your robot move from one side of the screen to another. Then you realized each shape is a discrete object, and you can at…

Totally agree, and that's what I love about it, it allows you to focus on the fun parts of building games (e.g. moving graphics around, designing your own perfect control scheme) instead of spending twelve hours learning the intricacies of shader programming and whatnot.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#142

Post by spitfire »

betamaxthetape wrote: post #68

I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's…

I had a look at the first link and tried two decks at random. The very first one was a "gayme" (Get it? We're gay! It was the early 1990's), the second one "models" was girls in bikinis (Nice dithering!).

Point I'm making is that hypercard gave access to absolutely everyone. Which means it was used far outside the normal niche technical interests.

It's sort of a neat archaeological dig into the mind of a broad spectrum of people at the time. Rather than a slice of niche technical individuals.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#143

Post by wlesieutre »

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…

It did get color support though, no? Kind of kludged in (iirc you had to manually add Color Tools support to a stack), but Myst was famously put together in HyperCard, and that came out in 1993.

Edit: Myst apparently used a plug-in (InColor from Heizer Software), and 2.3 officially added Color Tools

https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its...

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#144

Post by Jetrel »

dasil003 wrote: post #127
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…

Yeah, you, also, absolutely nailed it.

By the time they could have mustered any serious effort to save it, the web had already won.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#145

Post by Jetrel »

grishka wrote: post #135
tombert wrote: post #38

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…

There is a very active open-source project called Ruffle[1] which aims to reimplement Flash Player to play the already existing Flash content. It runs in the browser via WASM as well as a standalone native app on all three desktop OSes. It doesn't support AS3 yet. But as far as I can tell, there's no one trying to recreate Flash the authoring program. Which is a big shame IMO. We need something that enables creativit…

Yeah - now that a legacy of flash apps exist, having a runtime for them is important.

But as you say - back in the old days, the truly important thing had nothing to do with the runtime, and had everything to do with the authoring program.

Someone really needs to build something similar, and - because we're starting in a later era, the only influence it needs to take from flash lies in the UI/UX.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#146

Post by ajuc »

mumblemumble wrote: post #39
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.

I think that TFA said it well, if brusquely: > 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. The thing that made HyperCard great was that it wasn't very capable. Which made it approachable.

> Which made it approachable.

And still WWW had orders of magnitude more users almost immediately.

Hypercard is only easier to learn than "regular" programming languages if you're English speaker.

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#147

Post by hypertele-Xii »

tarsinge wrote: post #134
tombert wrote: post #38

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, yo…

You touch on something that for me is the real issue: there is only one level of complexity today: maximum. Building a blog, a news website, a niche web app, or the new Facebook, it nearly doesn't matter, you must use the latest state of art tools. We have completely lost all the intermediate levels between beginner and professional. Sometimes it's justified as an unfortunate effect of the internet for sites and apps…

Well there's always PICO-8.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

#149

Post by betamaxthetape »

spitfire wrote: post #142
betamaxthetape wrote: post #68

I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's…

I had a look at the first link and tried two decks at random. The very first one was a "gayme" (Get it? We're gay! It was the early 1990's), the second one "models" was girls in bikinis (Nice dithering!). Point I'm making is that hypercard gave access to absolutely everyone. Which means it was used far outside the normal niche technical interests. It's sort of a neat archaeological dig into the mind of a broad spectr…

Indeed. The "gayme" one you mention is called Caper in the Castro, and is considered one of (if not the) earliest known LGBTQ video games.

https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/

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